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Menu engineering calculator: the four boxes
For owners and chefs reviewing a menu. Enter each dish's units sold, food cost and price, or paste your till's sales export, and see its margin, its popularity and which of the four boxes it falls in: star, plowhorse, puzzle or dog. Any currency, and nothing leaves your browser.
Opens on the worked example from LeBruto, Ashley and Quain (1997): 16 mains and a week's sales.
Paste from your till or a spreadsheet
How it works
Margin per dish
price − food cost
The contribution margin: what each plate leaves once its food is paid for.
Popularity
dish's units ÷ all units sold ≥ 70% × (100% ÷ number of dishes)
The share of the group a dish sells is its menu mix. With 16 mains the line is 70% × 6.25% = 4.38%: a main selling at least that share is popular.
High or low margin
dish's margin > total margin ÷ total units sold
The line is the weighted average margin, so a dish that sells a lot pulls it towards its own. A dish exactly on the average counts as low.
The four boxes
Stars: popular, high margin. Plowhorses: popular, low margin. Puzzles: not popular, high margin. Dogs: not popular, low margin. The names are Kasavana and Smith's.
What owners usually try
Keep stars as they are and in sight. Make plowhorses cheaper to plate or a little dearer. Move, rename or recommend puzzles. Replace dogs, unless one brings guests in for something else. Change one thing at a time, then run the same period again.
What it leaves out
Labour, how long a dish takes, and what a dish does for the rest of the bill. LeBruto and colleagues later added labour as a third label. Read the boxes as questions to ask about a dish, not verdicts. To cost a dish from its ingredients first, use the food cost calculator.
The method: M. L. Kasavana and D. I. Smith, Menu Engineering: A Practical Guide to Menu Analysis (Hospitality Publications, 1982; revised 1990). The rules as stated here, and the worked example the calculator opens on: S. M. LeBruto, R. A. Ashley and W. Quain, "Using the contribution margin aspect of menu engineering to enhance financial results", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 9/4 (1997), pp. 161–167, tables I, II and V. The calculator gives the paper's labels for all 16 dishes.
Volio
Your best sellers, without the spreadsheet
Volio's back office shows takings by day and hour, items and margins (your best sellers), and exports them to Excel or CSV, from the orders guests and staff put through it.
See the back officeQuestions owners ask
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What is the 70% rule?
A dish counts as popular when its share of the dishes sold is at least 70% of an even share. With 10 mains an even share is 10%, so a main is popular from 7% of mains sold.
Why margin in money and not food cost percentage?
Because a low percentage on a cheap dish can leave less behind than a higher one on a dear dish. As LeBruto, Ashley and Quain put it: "it is after all, dollars that are deposited in the bank, not percentages."
Which dishes should I put in together?
Dishes guests choose between: the mains, or the starters, or the cocktails. Mixing a coffee with a steak makes the coffee a star and the steak a dog for no useful reason. Use one period with the same menu, a few weeks or a month.
Can I paste from my till?
Yes. Export item sales as CSV or copy the columns from a spreadsheet, and paste them in. Columns are found by their headings (name, price, cost, sold and the usual variants); without headings they're read as name, price, cost, sold. Commas, semicolons or tabs, decimal dots or commas.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. The sums run in your browser. Copy link puts the dishes in the part of the address after #, which browsers never send to a server.
See what each dish earns, week by week.
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