Menu engineering: the four-box method
Plot every item by margin and popularity, then act on each quadrant.
The two axes
Menu engineering plots each item on two axes: contribution margin (menu price minus plate cost) and popularity (how often it sells). Cross them and every dish lands in one of four boxes.
The four boxes
Stars — high margin, high popularity: feature them. Plowhorses — low margin, high popularity: popular but not profitable, so re-cost, re-portion or nudge the price. Puzzles — high margin, low popularity: profitable but overlooked, so reposition or describe them better. Dogs — low margin, low popularity: fix or cut.
Why price alone isn’t the answer
You can’t engineer a menu you haven’t costed. A plowhorse might just need a cheaper garnish; a puzzle might need a better spot on the page. The move depends on the box, not a blanket price rise.
Keep it current
Ingredient prices drift, so an item’s margin drifts with them. Re-cost recipes when supplier prices move and re-plot every season — a star can quietly become a plowhorse when the protein price jumps.
PULSE costs every recipe from your live invoice prices and shows margin against popularity from real POS sales — so you can see each item’s box and re-cost the moment a supplier price moves, instead of engineering off a stale spreadsheet.