Free tools · menu
A GP calculator looks at one dish. This tool looks at the whole menu. Add each dish with its menu price, what the food costs you, and how many you sold. It sorts every dish into one of four groups, so you can see which dishes make you money and which ones need a change.
The calculator
Nothing is sent anywhere — the maths runs in your browser and we never see what you type. Every field starts at a deliberately ordinary default rather than a flattering one.
Before you quote the figure at anyone
01
Put starters, mains and desserts in separate runs. A dessert will always sell fewer and make less per plate than a main course. If you mix them, the desserts will all look like problems when they are not.
02
The whole result depends on the food cost of each dish. Use a costed recipe with today's supplier prices, including garnish and sauces. If food costs are old guesses, the groups will be wrong too.
03
A dish with a good profit might take a chef ten minutes to plate on a busy night. This tool only looks at price, food cost and sales. Think about the time and skill each dish needs before you make a change.
Questions
Getting a number you don’t recognise from your own accounts is usually worth a conversation rather than another spreadsheet.
Menu engineering is a way to judge every dish on two things: how well it sells, and how much profit it makes per plate. Putting the two together shows which dishes to keep, which to reprice, which to promote, and which to change. It works best with real sales numbers from your till.
These are the classic names for the four groups. Stars are popular and profitable. Plowhorses (also called workhorses) sell well but make less. Puzzles make good money but do not sell enough. Dogs do neither. This tool uses plain names instead, but the method is the same.
Every time the menu changes, and at least every three months. Supplier prices change often, so a dish that was profitable in spring can be losing money by autumn. Use the sales from the last four to eight weeks, so one busy weekend does not change the picture.
Do not remove it, because customers like it. Instead, make small changes. Check the portion size, use a cheaper side, or raise the price a little. Because it sells so often, even 50p more profit per plate can add up to a lot over a year.
WHY Hospitality