Menu engineering is based on the Kasavana-Smith matrix, which has been the standard in menu engineering for forty years. It divides your menu into four quadrants based on two axes: how profitable a dish is (margin per portion) and how popular it is (share of sales). This allows you to see, for each dish, whether you should protect it, reprice it, promote it or remove it from the menu.
Each dish is compared with the average for its own category. The boundaries are therefore relative: there is always something that falls below the average.
🟢 Winners: high sales and a good margin. Protect: keep the recipe and price as they are and feature the dish prominently on your menu.
🔶 Bestsellers: high sales volume, but low profit margin. Your customers love it, so check the cost price first before raising the price.
🟦 Sleepers: good profit margin, but low sales. There’s profit to be made here: give it a better spot on the menu, change the name or actively recommend the dish.
🔺 Losers: low sales and a meagre margin. A candidate for removal, unless you’re offering it deliberately, for example as a vegetarian or allergy-friendly option.
The columns in the table form the basis of this model:
Revenue: the selling price per item.
Cost price: what the item costs per unit.
Margin: the difference between revenue and purchase price, in euros and as a percentage.
Share: the proportion of sales within the category accounted for by this item, i.e. how popular it is.
Quadrant: which of the four quadrants the item falls into, based on margin and share.
Do you have any further questions about this? Please feel free to contact us!
Kind regards,
The Catermonkey Team 🍌