Restaurant Menu Engineering
Your menu is built for customer satisfaction — but is it engineered for profit? Probably not.
Few restaurants understand the importance of properly pricing and costing out their menus, and its impact to their bottom line. Do you?
Menu engineering is a strategic review of your menu that identifies items that are popular and profitable. We work with you to help make the most of your offerings and capitalize on incremental revenues.
Here are just some of the benefits of our menu engineering services:
Maximize Menu Profit
Menu Engineering starts with ensuring your entire menu is properly recipe’d and costed and converts into bottom-line profitability; our approach typically increases your profit by 3-4% of sales. You’ll get the most bang for your buck while establishing a pricing system that suits the needs of your operation as well as your guests.
Improve Guest Experience
Engineering your menu based on items that generate a strong margin and have guest appeal will allow you to curate a menu that your guests love and seek out your restaurant for. You’ll be confident that whatever they choose will be excellent in quality, preparation and profitability.
Streamline Inventory
Rather than having an endless list of menu items or keeping around dishes that don’t perform, we’ll help your team hone your offerings for ease of execution. This will ensure that your kitchen can run more smoothly and efficiently and help you manage inventory.
Quantity Over Margin Graph
A QuaM graph is used to visually depict a menu item’s popularity relative to its profit over time. This helps operators understand how the menu items contribute to profit. For example, Star items should be promoted often as they are popular and highly profitable, whereas Dogs should be reworked and/or price adjusted.
Are you ready to achieve your financial goals and increase your bottom line? Submit this form to speak with one of our experts about how we can analyze your offerings and engineer your menu to help your restaurant operation thrive.
You have questions; we have answers.
Q: What’s the difference between menu development and menu engineering?
A: Menu development refers to building the content of your menu; selecting a theme or style, choosing the dishes, developing and writing out the recipes, naming menu items, etc. Menu engineering is the process of determining the profitability of each item and pricing accordingly to optimize your bottom line. First, the whole menu must be properly recipe’d and costed, then a QuaM graph is used to analyze the relationship between each item’s popularity and profitability. Effective pricing and positioning follow from there.
Q: I’m just a small restaurant operation. Do I really need to engineer my menu?
A: Yes, menu engineering is essential for a restaurant of any size or concept to optimize its profit model and general profitability. Smaller operations tend to have fewer menu items, so if you're selling several units of a popular item that has a low margin, the potential impact on your bottom line is even greater.
Q: How much money will engineering my menu save me? How much more profitable can I expect to be?
A: Over the past twenty years, our team has engineered hundreds of menus. Generally, a menu that is engineered for profit maximization using our techniques will add 3-4% of sales to the bottom line. For an operation with $2 million sales, that equals up to $80,000 per year of additional profit.
Q: What tools are available to streamline and simplify the menu engineering process?
A: Navi, a restaurant business management software (coming soon) is an incredible industry tool that makes executing and maintaining menu engineering techniques simpler. Used by over 400 restaurants and counting, our team of industry experts at The Fifteen Group helped to develop its software and functions. Navi provides a centralized and streamlined way to track inventory and food costs, cost out recipes and more.
See what our clients say about our work:
“Working with The Fifteen Group has allowed us to take our business to the next level in terms of profitability and efficiency. Their menu engineering expertise has been hugely beneficial to the Cafe’s operation by strengthening our offerings and profit model. The patience and care they put into our staff recruitment process have set us up for success in the long term, with a strong, productive team able to better serve our guests. Their work has been invaluable to every aspect of our business.”
“We’ve used The Fifteen Group for two projects - menu costing and a rather custom accounting project, and both times we’ve been impressed with the results. David and his team took the time to understand our needs and proposed a succinct roadmap for accomplishing the goals we set to achieve in a specific timeframe and within a reasonable budget. The Fifteen Group gets restaurants, and I have no doubt they can help you streamline your operations to achieve maximal efficiency!”
“Doing a kitchen concept refresh in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic was a big risk but needed to be done. We needed to take our customer experience to the next level when our doors reopened. The Fifteen Group redesigned our kitchen to maximize output from a tiny kitchen to a large restaurant and built us a menu that was exciting for our customers and achievable for our team.”