Menu engineering: designing your menu to make more money

Most menus come together like this: you start from the old one, add a dish the chef liked, drop the one that had gone stale, and run a quick pass over the prices. Nobody stops to ask which dish actually puts money in the till and which one, instead, works at a loss while taking up a valuable line.

Menu engineering flips that habit on its head. Instead of designing your menu by feel, you build it on two concrete numbers: how much each dish sells and how much each dish earns. That's the difference between a menu thrown together and a menu designed to make you money.

What menu engineering is, in plain words

Menu engineering is a method for deciding what goes on the menu, where it goes and at what price, based on data rather than impressions. The principle is simple: every dish is looked at across two dimensions.

• How much it sells — the portions leaving the kitchen over a period, i.e. its popularity.
• How much it earns — the margin you keep every time you serve it, i.e. price minus food cost.

A dish can be high or low on each of the two. Cross them and you get a precise picture of your menu: you see where the money is and where the dishes holding you back are hiding. This isn't a big-chain exercise — the sales and costs you already have in the building are enough.

The four-category matrix

Cross sales and margin, and every dish lands in one of four boxes. The names say it all:

• Stars — sell a lot and earn a lot. Your champions: people love them and they make you money. Protect them and put them front and centre.
• Plow horses — sell a lot but earn little. Customers order them constantly, but the margin is thin. Here the work is on cost.
• Puzzles — earn a lot but sell little. They have a great margin, but few people choose them. They need pushing or repositioning.
• Dogs — sell little and earn little. They neither please nor pay. They take up space and complicate the kitchen.

The goal isn't to have only stars — impossible — but to know which box each dish is in and act accordingly.

How to act on each category

Once the dishes are placed, the moves are precise:

• Stars: protect them. Don't touch what works, but showcase it. A small price tweak here goes almost unnoticed and is worth a lot, because you sell them in volume.
• Plow horses: work on the cost. They sell heavily, so every penny of margin you claw back multiplies. Review the recipe, the portion sizes, the suppliers. Even 50p more on a dish with 40 orders a week is £80 a month.
• Puzzles: push them. They earn well; the problem is visibility. Move them up the page, give them a description that makes you hungry, have the floor recommend them.
• Dogs: rework them or drop them. Try rethinking them first (price, portion, presentation). If they don't move, off they come: fewer items, a faster kitchen, less waste.

The menu layout tricks

The menu isn't a plain list: it's a sales tool, and how it's built shifts the orders. A few tested tricks:

• Position matters. The eye starts at the top of each section. That's where stars and puzzles go, not the dogs.
• Descriptions sell. A dish told well — where the ingredient comes from, how it's prepared — sells more and justifies a higher price than one dashed off in two words.
• No pound sign. "12" sells better than "£12". The currency symbol reminds the customer they're spending: make it small or drop it.
• Use price anchoring. One expensive dish at the top of the list makes the ones below look reasonable. The customer compares, and a high reference point nudges the choice toward the middle — where you've put the dishes that earn.
• Highlight the right dishes. A box, an icon, a "most ordered" tag pulls the eye. Save them for stars and puzzles, never for a dog.

The mistake of pushing your best-seller

There's a mistake almost everyone makes: pick the most-ordered dish and bet everything on it — in the window, on social, in the server's recommendation. It sounds logical, but it's a trap.

The best-seller isn't necessarily the one that earns. Often it's exactly a plow horse: people love it precisely because it's cheap, on a thin margin. Pushing it even harder means selling more while earning the same, or less — while the high-margin dishes stay in the shade.

The right question isn't "what do I sell most?", but "what am I better off selling most?". Sometimes they line up, and that's the perfect star. Often they don't. Only by crossing sales and margin do you find out.

Measuring sales and margins to fill the matrix

All of this works on one condition: having the two numbers for every dish. Sales come off the receipt or the till. Margin, though, needs a real, up-to-date food cost — and that's the part almost nobody keeps in order, because supplier prices change constantly and the sums have to be redone.

And it's the boring part: cost of every recipe, margin, popularity, all kept alive month after month. AFLUYO starts from your real invoices, works out the margin of each dish and crosses it with sales, so you see at a glance who's a star, a plow horse, a puzzle or a dog — and warns you when a price rise pushes a dish into another category. Try it free for 7 days, no card.

The menu is the most powerful sales tool you have: every customer reads it, every day, before every order. Leaving it to chance is like leaving the till open. Designing it — on the numbers, not by feel — is the cheapest way there is to make more money from the same covers.