Menu engineering: designing a menu that sells

Menu engineering sounds like corporate jargon, but it comes down to one question: which dishes earn money and which just take up space. Answering it requires two numbers per item.

The two numbers you start with

• Popularity — how many times the item sold in the last 90 days, as a percentage of all dishes ordered.
• Cash margin — price minus ingredient cost, in złoty per portion. Not a percentage.

Four categories, four different decisions

The biggest money is usually sitting in the plowhorses. On an item that sells 400 times a month, a 2 PLN price increase is 800 PLN of pure margin — and customers barely notice it if the new price lands sensibly.

Online menus follow different rules

Classic menu engineering was built for print, where the eye roams the whole page. In an online menu the customer scrolls a phone top to bottom and sees one or two items at a time. The consequences are concrete:

• Order is your strongest tool. The first three items in a category collect a disproportionate share of orders. Put stars there, not the low-margin “classics”.
• A photo outperforms any description. An item without a photo in a list of photographed items looks like a mistake and sells noticeably worse.
• Keep categories short. Past 8–10 items in a section, customers stop choosing and fall back on what they know. A shorter menu means a higher basket and a faster kitchen.
• Modifiers instead of variants. Rather than three separate items with different toppings — one item and a list of add-ons. Simpler menu, bigger basket.
• Descriptions are ingredients, not poetry. Two lines of specifics sell better than a paragraph about passion and tradition.

Pricing: a few things that work

• Drop the currency symbol next to the number where the layout allows — “48” reads lighter than “48 PLN”.
• No .99 endings. In hospitality they signal cheap food. Whole złoty or endings in 0/5 look better.
• An anchor at the top. One pricier item at the start of a section makes the rest feel reasonable.
• Prices on the same line as the name, not in a right-aligned column — a column invites comparison on price alone.

A menu is not a list of what you can cook. It is a sales tool that happens to take the shape of a list of dishes.

A working rhythm for your menu

1. 1

   Once a quarter: an item sales report

   Export the last 90 days of sales and calculate popularity and cash margin for every item.

2. 2

   Assign categories

   The four groups from the table above. Mark every item, with no exceptions for sentimental dishes.

3. 3

   Make at most five changes

   More changes at once make it impossible to tell what worked. Five changes, one quarter, one conclusion.

4. 4

   Compare the next quarter

   Look at average basket and margin per order, not at order count alone.