What is menu engineering?
Menu engineering is making your menu and dishes work as hard as they can for you, ensuring you have great, on-trend menu items that appeal to customers while driving sales and profitability.
It’s an exercise to review dish popularity against profitability and complexity with the goal to increase profitability for your pizzeria, café or restaurant. Once you understand which dishes generate the most cash and appeal, and which don’t, you can make informed changes to your menu.
How do I do menu engineering?
With pizza being one of the most profitable foods on the planet, it might feel like it’s hard to make it more profitable. But there’s a step-by-step process starting with a deep dive into the numbers and finishing with a review of your menu design.
Let’s break it down
Look at the numbers – review dish performance, cost of sales and margins
Asses the dishes – consider the ingredients used, dish complexity, wastage, and customer appeal
Make adjustments – adjust price or margin through recipe development or reduce complexity
Menu design – know which dishes to promote and where to place them on a menu
Finally, the key to successful menu engineering is to look at the hard facts of menu performance. Sometimes it can mean saying “ciao” to one of your personal favorites on the menu. As hard as it can be, your head must rule your heart here.
