Menu engineering
Every item by popularity and by contribution, and what to do with each one.
Two axes: how often an item sells and how much margin it contributes. The four quadrants each carry a different action, and the common mistake is treating menu decisions as a food cost percentage problem.
A high margin item that sells rarely does not need repricing. It needs a better position on the menu or a mention from the server.
Where everything sits
How to work this page
Contribution is impossible without recipe cost. Cost the items that make up most of your covers and the rest can wait.
Popular and profitable: protect and feature. Popular and thin: reprice or re-engineer. Unpopular and profitable: promote and reposition. Unpopular and thin: remove.
A dish at forty percent food cost contributing twelve dollars beats one at twenty percent contributing four. Percentage alone leads to the wrong decisions.
A repriced item or a repositioned one shows its effect within two weeks.
On a phone
Every figure from the desktop appears here, stacked rather than reduced. Tables scroll inside themselves so the page never moves sideways, and figures keep their separators and their alignment at every width.
Questions people actually ask
Analysis quarterly, changes as indicated. Constant change confuses regulars and prevents you learning anything from a change.
Mark it as intentional. It reads as a costing error otherwise, and its job is to bring people in rather than to contribute.