Hospitality glossary · Money and margin
Menu engineering is the practice of plotting every dish by how often it sells and how much cash profit it makes, then redesigning the menu around what that grid shows.
In practice
Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.
The classic four groups are stars, which sell well and make money and should be easy to find on the page; plowhorses, popular but thin, where a small cost or price change is worth a lot because of the volume; puzzles, profitable but ignored, which usually need describing better or moving; and dogs, which do neither and are taking up space. The exercise needs accurate dish costings, so it is only ever as good as your recipe cards.
Ranking on GP percentage instead of cash profit. A dish at 78% GP selling four a week contributes less than one at 62% selling eighty, and menus edited on percentage alone routinely promote the wrong things and quietly remove the ones actually paying the rent.
Questions
Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.
Menu engineering is the practice of plotting every dish by how often it sells and how much cash profit it makes, then redesigning the menu around what that grid shows. The classic four groups are stars, which sell well and make money and should be easy to find on the page; plowhorses, popular but thin, where a small cost or price change is worth a lot because of the volume; puzzles, profitable but ignored, which usually need describing better or moving; and dogs, which do neither and are taking up space. The exercise needs accurate dish costings, so it is only ever as good as your recipe cards.
Ranking on GP percentage instead of cash profit. A dish at 78% GP selling four a week contributes less than one at 62% selling eighty, and menus edited on percentage alone routinely promote the wrong things and quietly remove the ones actually paying the rent.
WHY Hospitality