Do You Know Your Most Profitable Menu Items?

You might know which dishes are popular.
But do you know which ones actually make you money?

Most restaurants don’t. They price based on competitors, chef intuition, or old cost sheets — not real-time profitability data.
The result? High sales volume but low margins.

Let’s change that with a few practical steps.

Step 1: Track Profit, Not Just Sales

A full dining room doesn’t always mean healthy profits.
A menu item that sells a lot but has high food or labor costs could be quietly eating your margins.

Start by listing your top 10 best-sellers and calculate:

Food Cost % = (Ingredient cost ÷ Menu price) × 100
Gross Profit = Menu price – Ingredient cost

👉 Pro tip: Aim for dishes with a 70% or higher gross profit margin to lead your promotions.

Step 2: Build a Simple Menu Matrix

Divide your dishes into four groups:

Stars – High profit, high popularity.
Plow Horses – Low profit, high popularity.
Puzzles – High profit, low popularity.
Dogs – Low profit, low popularity.

Once you see the pattern, you can:

Promote Stars heavily.
Reprice or rework Plow Horses.
Market Puzzles better (maybe guests don’t know they exist).
Retire Dogs quietly.

👉 Pro tip: Use a color-coded spreadsheet — green for Stars, red for Dogs — to visualize it instantly.

Step 3: Use POS Data (or Even Excel) to Spot Trends

You don’t need an expensive system to understand your menu’s performance.
If your POS lets you export sales by item, start there.
If not, track manually once a week in Excel.

Look for:

Items with rising or falling sales trends.
Profitability per category (starters, mains, desserts).
Items with high voids or discounts — a hidden cost often missed.

👉 Pro tip: A simple weekly report can reveal patterns that improve margins by 5–10% without raising prices.

Step 4: Update Prices Intelligently

Costs change. Your prices should too.
But instead of blanket increases, adjust strategically:

Round up high-performing dishes by 5–10%.
Leave popular low-cost items as they are (to keep perception value).
Bundle lower performers with best-sellers (e.g., “Set Menu” or “Chef’s Selection”).

👉 Pro tip: Small, data-driven price adjustments can lift total profitability faster than any new campaign.

Step 5: Make Profitability a Team Habit

Share insights with your staff.
When the kitchen and front-of-house teams know which dishes drive profit, they can help push them naturally.

Add a quick “Menu Performance” talk in your weekly briefing — one insight, one action.

Final Thoughts

Menu Intelligence is not about spreadsheets.
It’s about clarity — knowing exactly what makes your restaurant thrive.

When you track data regularly, pricing becomes proactive, not reactive.
And that’s how you move from guessing profits to engineering them.

If your diagnostic score for Intelligence was low, start simple.
Pick your top 10 dishes, calculate their true profit, and make one decision based on data this week.
That’s where real transformation starts.

👉 Take the Restaurant Diagnostic below and discover how your business scores across all six VISITA™ pillars — from Visibility to Automation.