Industry-specific · Free tool
Menu Engineering Matrix
Paste your menu items with cost, price, and quantity sold. The matrix classifies each dish into stars, dogs, puzzles, or plowhorses based on contribution margin and popularity. Quadrant chart included.
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The four quadrants
- Stars: high contribution + high popularity. Feature them; protect the price.
- Plowhorses: low contribution + high popularity. Reprice or re-engineer the recipe.
- Puzzles: high contribution + low popularity. Move to better menu position, train staff to upsell.
- Dogs: low contribution + low popularity. Remove. Free up prep + procurement complexity.
Why contribution, not food cost %
A ₹100 dish at 25% food cost contributes ₹75. A ₹500 dish at 40% food cost contributes ₹300. The second makes more money per sale. Menu engineering is about contribution-per-sale × volume-sold, not the percentage cost ratio.
Run it monthly, not annually
Tastes, prices, and operations shift. Run it monthly for stable menus, weekly during launches. FireAI does this live on POS data - menu engineering in FireAI.
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