Defining Menu Engineering

Your menu is more than just a list of food offerings, it is your most important marketing tool to attract and excite your customers, but it is also the result of you having a detailed understanding of your overheads and cost of sales so that you can develop a pricing strategy that makes your establishment profitable. You need to understand the contribution that each dish on your menu makes to your profitability targets.

Challenges of increasing food prices and overheads, stiff competition and exacting customers are having a profound impact the profitability of establishments. Menu engineering is a process that allows you to gain a good balance between popularity and profitability of your menu.

Menu engineering is a process of evaluating and optimizing your restaurant menu pricing and design to create a more profitable menu and therefore business.

Menu engineering involves using sales data and food costings to categorise your menu items into four different categories based on profitability and popularity. You are then able to make decisions on what menu items to retain or remove from the menu. Once you have done this you apply the principles of menu psychology and redesign your menu.