Restaurant Analytics
Restaurant Menu Engineering: A Practical Guide
Menu engineering is the habit of judging every dish on two things — how often it sells and how much it leaves you after its ingredient cost — and then changing the menu on purpose: keeping the dishes that do both, reworking the ones that do only one, and replacing the ones that do neither. It needs two numbers per dish: sales from your orders, and food cost from your recipes.
The two numbers you need
- Popularity: how many of each dish you sold in a period, from your order data.
- Contribution: the selling price minus the ingredient cost of one portion — what the dish leaves after paying for what goes into it.
Without recipes and ingredient costs you can still rank dishes by sales, but you cannot tell a busy dish that earns little from one that earns a lot.
Sort the menu into four groups
| Sells well? | Earns well? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Keep it visible; protect the recipe and the portion |
| Yes | No | Look at its cost and price; try a small change first |
| No | Yes | Make it easier to find: a better photo, description or position |
| No | No | Replace it, or keep it only for a reason you can name |
Judge "well" against your own menu — above the menu's average, for example — rather than against a number taken from somewhere else.
A simpler first step: ABC
If you have no cost data yet, start with an ABC ranking by revenue: the few dishes that bring in most of the money (A), a middle group (B), and the long tail (C). The C dishes are the first candidates to cut or rework, because they take space on the menu and in the kitchen for little return.
Changes worth trying
- Rewrite the description of a dish guests open but rarely order.
- Add a real photo to a dish that earns well but is hard to find.
- Move a dish to the top of its category, or into a featured section.
- Suggest a pairing with a dish it is often ordered with.
- Adjust a portion or an ingredient before you change a price.
How often to review
Review the menu after a period long enough to be fair to every dish — once a month is a reasonable rhythm — and whenever supplier prices change. Change a few dishes at a time and compare the same period afterwards, so you know which change worked.
The other numbers worth watching: restaurant analytics metrics.
Menu engineering with Thmenu
Thmenu's Menu ABC Analysis ranks your dishes by their share of revenue over the window you choose and lists the ones that bring in least. Once recipes and ingredient costs are entered, the COGS & Margin Report shows the cost and margin of each dish. Menu performance shows which dishes guests open, add to the cart and order, and which dishes they order together, and you can mark dishes as featured so they appear in a section of their own. Sales figures come from orders placed through Thmenu.