A menu can look great and still leave money on the table. A Menu MRI takes a deeper look at what customers are buying, what each item costs to produce and how much profit those items contribute.
By combining your sales data, food costs and selling prices, Menu Surgeon can identify which items are performing well, which may need attention and where opportunities may exist before decisions are made about your menu.
Looking only at food-cost percentage doesn’t tell the whole story. An item can have a higher food-cost percentage and still put more dollars in the register than an item with a lower percentage.
Menu MRI looks at both popularity and contribution margin—the amount of money left after the food cost of an item is subtracted from its selling price.
That gives us a better picture of how individual menu items contribute to the restaurant and provides useful information for decisions involving pricing, placement, promotion, portioning, recipes and the menu itself.
The analysis starts with information from your restaurant—not assumptions about what should or shouldn’t be selling. Menu Surgeon combines several pieces of data to build a clearer picture of menu performance.
Needing good data is a given, but understanding how all of the data works together to assist your decisions on everything from ordering ingredients, to promoting and marketing the right menu items, is the real determiner of future success.
Your point-of-sale reports tell us how many of each menu item customers actually purchased during the period being analyzed.
Recipe and ingredient costs help determine what it costs the restaurant to produce each item.
Current menu prices allow us to calculate the contribution margin generated each time an item is sold.
We calculate how much of a category’s sales each item represents and compare that performance with the category benchmark.
Selling price minus food cost shows how many dollars each sale contributes before the restaurant’s other expenses.
Unit profit combined with the number sold helps reveal which items are contributing the most profit dollars over the period analyzed.
Menu engineering compares an item’s profitability with its popularity. That places menu items into four broad classifications, each pointing toward different questions and potential opportunities.
Strong performers. These are items customers want and that generate above-average contribution margin within their category.
Profitable when sold, but ordered less frequently. These items may deserve better positioning, promotion, descriptions or visibility.
Customers order them frequently, but their contribution margin falls below the category benchmark. Pricing, portioning or ingredient costs may deserve attention.
These items perform below the category benchmarks in both areas and may warrant changes, repositioning or possible removal.
Menu engineering isn’t valuable because it produces a spreadsheet. The value comes from understanding what the numbers are telling us about the restaurant.
A Menu MRI can reveal items generating substantial profit dollars, popular dishes with margin challenges, profitable items customers may be overlooking and menu items that deserve a closer look.
Those findings become part of the conversation about what should happen next. Sometimes the answer is a price adjustment. Sometimes it’s a recipe or portion change. Sometimes an item needs more visibility. And sometimes the menu itself needs to change.