Every menu has dishes that quietly fund the business and dishes that quietly drain it, and sales reports alone don't tell you which is which. Menu engineering plots each item on two axes, how often it sells and how much margin it makes, and sorts your menu into four boxes: stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs. Enter your dishes with units sold, selling price and plate cost, and the matrix does the sorting.
A dish is a Star if both its popularity and its margin are above the menu average, a Plowhorse if popular but low-margin, a Puzzle if high-margin but slow-selling, and a Dog if it is below average on both.
| Dish | Units sold | Price (₹) | Plate cost (₹) | Margin | Quadrant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ₹309.00 | Star | |||||
| ₹239.00 | Plowhorse | |||||
| ₹429.00 | Puzzle | |||||
| ₹184.00 | Dog |
High margin, high popularity. Protect and feature them, never discount.
Popular but thin margin. Nudge the price up or re-engineer the cost.
Profitable but slow. Reposition, rename, or have staff recommend them.
Below average on both. Strong candidates to cut from the menu.
Stars: protect them, feature them, never discount them. Plowhorses: popular but thin, raise the price slightly or re-engineer the recipe cost. Puzzles: profitable but ignored, reposition them on the menu, rename them, or have staff recommend them. Dogs: cut them, or keep one or two only if they serve a purpose like a kids option.
A full month is the practical minimum, it smooths out weekday and weekend patterns. Avoid festival weeks or unusual periods, they distort popularity. Re-run the matrix each quarter or after any menu or price change.
That is the standard Kasavana-Smith convention. Using the raw average would mark nearly half the menu unpopular by construction. The 70% factor gives dishes a fair band around the mean before they get flagged as slow movers.
Rank every dish by margin percentage and total profit contribution, with a colour heat scale that makes the weak spots impossible to miss.
See how a recipe's cost and food-cost % move when seasonal ingredient prices spike. Compare current vs peak pricing side by side.