Free tool
Menu engineering calculator
Enter each dish's price, food cost and units sold over the same period. We score popularity and cash contribution against your own menu average and tell you which items to protect, re-price, reposition or remove.
Your menu
Menu average: 64 units · £12 margin per dish · total contribution £4,598
| Dish | Price £ | Food cost £ | Units sold | Margin | Contribution | Class | Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £15 | £1,812 | Star | |||||
| £11 | £1,066 | Plowhorse | |||||
| £7 | £511 | Plowhorse | |||||
| £18 | £490 | Puzzle | |||||
| £10 | £436 | Dog | |||||
| £13 | £284 | Puzzle |
Star
Protect it. Keep it prominent, never discount it, and hold quality and consistency above all else.
Plowhorse
Popular, thin margin. Re-engineer plate cost, nudge price up in small steps, pair with a high-margin drink.
Puzzle
Profitable but ignored. Rename, reposition on the page, brief the team to recommend it, or trial it as a special.
Dog
Low margin, low demand. Remove it unless it serves a dietary or signature purpose the numbers cannot see.
Turn the menu numbers into covers
Menu engineering fixes margin per cover. Marketing fixes how many covers you get. We run both together and report in cash, not percentages.
How to run menu engineering properly
Pull one clean trading period — four weeks is usually enough for a restaurant, twelve for a seasonal venue — and take units sold per dish from your till, not from memory. Cost each dish to the plate: protein, garnish, sides, oil, sauce and the wastage you genuinely incur, and ignore labour for this exercise so the comparison stays consistent between items.
The classification above compares each dish against your own menu average rather than an industry benchmark, which is what makes it actionable: a £13 margin can be excellent on a pub menu and poor in a fine-dining room. Act on the extremes first — protect the top two Stars, rebuild the worst Plowhorse, and delete the lowest Dog — then re-run the numbers a quarter later rather than rewriting the whole menu at once.
One warning that catches operators out: dropping a Dog rarely transfers its covers to a Star automatically. Guests substitute towards whatever sits nearest on the page, so plan the replacement position deliberately and brief the floor team on what to recommend in its place.
Menu engineering FAQs
- What is menu engineering?
- Menu engineering is the practice of scoring every dish on two axes — how popular it is and how much cash margin it contributes — then acting on the result. Items are classified as Stars (popular and profitable), Plowhorses (popular, thin margin), Puzzles (profitable but rarely ordered) and Dogs (neither), and each class has a different fix.
- How do you calculate contribution margin for a dish?
- Contribution margin is selling price minus food cost, per dish. A £18.50 main with £5.20 of food cost contributes £13.30. Multiply by units sold to get total cash contribution — the number that pays your rent, not the gross-profit percentage.
- Should I chase gross profit percentage or cash margin?
- Cash margin. A dish at 82% GP that sells four times a week earns less than a 64% GP dish that sells sixty times. Percentages are useful for purchasing discipline; cash contribution decides which dishes deserve menu real estate.
- How often should a restaurant re-run menu engineering?
- Score the menu quarterly, and again whenever you take a price rise or a key ingredient moves more than about 10%. Anything more frequent and you cannot tell whether the changes or the season moved the numbers.
- What do you do with a Plowhorse dish?
- Protect the volume, rebuild the margin. Trim portion or plate cost, re-engineer garnishes and sides, raise the price in small steps, or bundle it with a high-margin drink rather than delisting a dish guests come in for.
- What should happen to Dog dishes?
- Remove them, unless they exist for a reason the numbers cannot see — a dietary requirement, a signature that draws press, or a dish that uses a by-product of another. Every Dog on a menu costs prep time, stock lines and guest attention.
- How many items should a menu have?
- Fewer than most operators run. As a rule, if a section has more than seven items, the bottom two are usually Dogs that dilute the sales of everything above them and lengthen your prep list for no gain.
Where to go next
Related tools and services
Margin work pays off fastest when demand is also being managed. These are the pages operators use next.
- RevPAR, ADR and occupancy calculator
The hotel equivalent of this page — work out where room revenue is actually leaking.
- Guide: menu pricing for margin
How to take a price rise without losing covers, and where guests genuinely notice.
- Restaurant revenue management
Yield, covers and menu mix managed together, reported in cash contribution per service.