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Understand, 7 min read
Menu engineering, without the jargon
Sort every dish by how often it sells and how much it earns. Four boxes, four different jobs, and none of them is “delete the dogs”.
Menu engineering compares two numbers for every dish over the same period: how many you sold (popularity) and how much each one contributes after ingredients (contribution margin). It was formalised by Kasavana and Smith in the 1980s and it is still the most useful hour a menu gets each quarter.
The two numbers
- Contribution margin = net selling price (tax removed) − plate cost. Use money, not percentages: a dish at 40% food cost can still earn more rupees than one at 25%.
- Popularity = the dish’s share of all items sold in its section. The usual threshold is 70% of an equal share: with 10 mains, anything above 7% of main-course sales counts as popular.
The four boxes
| Popular | Not popular | |
|---|---|---|
| High margin | Star: protect it. Keep the recipe, the portion and the spot on the menu. | Puzzle: sell it better. Better description, better position, a server recommendation. |
| Low margin | Plowhorse: re-cost it. Small price move, smaller garnish, cheaper side. | Dog: question it. Keep only if it earns its place (a signature, a dietary need). |
Run it in an afternoon
- Export item sales for the last 8-12 weeks, by section.
- Attach a current plate cost to each item.
- Compute net price, margin and popularity; plot or sort into the four boxes.
- Change one thing per dish, write down what you changed, and look again in six weeks.