Evaluate and engineer your menu for more profit.
Cafe Owners, Restaurant Owners, and Head Chefs, is your menu making enough money? Do you know what menu items are profitable and what are not? When was the last time you reviewed your menu?
To save you time, here’s a quick, easy way to evaluate your menu to help boost your venue’s profit.
Stars, puzzles, workhorses and dogs.
Professional menu engineers divide their menu items into the following four categories as a way to review performance:
Stars - high profit, high popularity
Puzzles - high profit, low popularity
Workhorses - low profit, high popularity
Dogs - low profit, low popularity
Categorising items using the above headings will give you great insight into your menu’s overall performance and highlight the changes you need to make.
You can buy our Menu Profit Maximiser Tool to evaluate and adjust your menu using these four categories. It’s easy to use and will give you and your team instant clarity on what you need to do to boost profit.
1: Run a sales report and rate each item.
Run a sales report from your point of sale for the past month (or longer if you like).
Categorise each menu item as a star, puzzle, workhorse or dog (see above).
The goal is to identify popular and profitable items compared to low-profit, low-popularity items.
Notes
To categorise each item, you need to know your food costs (see below).
Use our Menu Review Tool to review your menu using the above categories.
You must know your food costs.
To categorise each menu item as a star, puzzle, workhorse or dog, you need to know your food cost percentage. You can’t run a profitable menu and strategically price your dishes without knowing your food costs. You have two choices. You guess, or you know. Create your own calculator using a spreadsheet, or grab our easy-to-use food cost calculator here. Aim for 30% food cost or lower.
Notes
Some venues, such as high-end restaurants, with high-priced items can afford to operate above a 30% food cost. But most cafes and restaurants should keep to 30% or lower.
2: Choose what to do for each item.
Once you’ve rated each menu item as a star, puzzle, workhorse or dog, choose how to improve performance. The only three options are keep, fix and delete.
Keep your stars
Fix your puzzles and workhorses
Delete your dogs
3: Keep your stars.
The best action for your top-performing menu items is to leave them as is. Don’t fix something that’s not broken. You can review food costs and portion size for your stars, but be careful not to disrupt a good thing. But, you still need to monitor sales and customer feedback.
4: Fix your puzzles and workhorses.
How to improve your puzzles
Puzzles are profitable but not popular. So there’s something not quite right with the dish.
Ask guests if you’re brave. Do a taste test.
Rename the dish. Sometimes it’s simply the name or description guests don’t like.
Re-imagine the dish. Sometimes it’s an ingredient guests don’t like. Experiment with different ingredients.
Try a revamped, renamed version as a special to see if it sells better.
If all fails, delete it.
How to improve your workhorses
Workhorses are popular but not profitable. Be careful not to remove popular items that are low profit. If they are popular, make them more profitable. There are several ways to fix this.
Improve food cost percentage.
Fix wastage. Is there avoidable waste and spoilage?
Fix portion control. Is there consistent portion control? Can the portion size be reduced? Do guests leave food on the plate?
Try different ingredients to get COGS to 30% or lower.
Increase the price. This strategy will get instant results, but be careful not to go too high. Yes, you will lose sales, but the increased profitability usually out-performs the loss.
5: Delete your dogs.
This one is easy. Remove it from the menu right away. The dish does not work, and it’s costing you money and your reputation.
What more can you do to increase your profit?
Get the Menu Profit Maximiser Tool to evaluate and fix your menu.
Purchase the Food Cost Calculator
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