Menu engineering ranks each dish on two axes — how well it sells and how much margin it keeps — and sorts the whole menu into four groups you act on differently. Here's the matrix, and how methodus builds it for you from live sales and real cost.
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Définition
Menu engineering is the practice of classifying every menu item by two measures — popularity (how much it sells) and profitability (the margin it keeps) — to decide what to promote, reprice, rework, or remove. Items fall into four groups: stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs.
Plot popularity on one axis and profitability on the other, and every dish lands in one of four quadrants. Each one has a different move.
High popularity · High margin
Your winners: loved and profitable. Protect them — keep the recipe exact, feature them on the menu, and never let their cost quietly drift.
High popularity · Low margin
Popular but thin. They pull people in but keep little. Re-engineer the cost (portion, yield, supplier) or reprice carefully — a small change moves a lot of covers.
Low popularity · High margin
Profitable but overlooked. The margin is there; the sales aren't. Rename, reposition, describe better, or have the team recommend them — small nudges, real upside.
Low popularity · Low margin
Neither loved nor profitable. Rework them into something better or take them off — they cost prep, stock and menu space for little return.
The classic problem with menu engineering is the inputs: popularity means pulling POS numbers, and profitability means a real, current cost per dish. methodus already holds both, so the matrix builds itself — no spreadsheet, no month-old costs.
Daily sales sync from your till, matched to each fiche — so popularity is what actually sold, not a guess.
Every dish is costed from your live purchase prices, updated as invoices come in. Set the price against a target with the selling-price calculator →
When a supplier price moves, a dish can slip from star to plowhorse overnight. Check the margin any time with the gross-margin calculator →
Menu engineering classifies each menu item by popularity (how much it sells) and profitability (the margin it keeps), sorting the menu into stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs. You then promote, reprice, rework or remove each item based on where it lands.
Stars are high-popularity, high-margin winners. Plowhorses sell well but keep little margin. Puzzles are profitable but under-sold. Dogs are neither popular nor profitable. Each quadrant calls for a different action — protect, re-engineer, reposition, or remove.
Profitability is the gross margin each item keeps: its selling price (ex-tax) minus its real ingredient cost. That cost must include yield loss and current purchase prices — a dish looks profitable until the supplier price moves and nobody updates the recipe.
Yes. methodus syncs daily sales from your POS for popularity and costs every dish from live purchase prices for profitability, so the star/plowhorse/puzzle/dog matrix builds itself from real data — not a spreadsheet you rebuild each month.
methodus reads your sales and your real costs and shows you the matrix — which plates to protect, fix, or drop. Start free.
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