Menu Engineering: Focus on Profitability

4 Min Read By Andy Rosenbloom

This edition of MRM's "Ask the Expert” features advice from Buyers Edge Platform on the topic of menu engineering.Please send questions to Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine Executive Editor Barbara Castiglia at bcastiglia@modernrestaurantmanagement.com.With restaurants reopening their patios and doors with limited menus and seats, now is the perfect time to make sure your menu is designed for margin, profitability and strong sales. However, effective menu engineering requires an honest look at your menu, your purchasing patterns and your data.

When is the last time you costed out your recipes?

To do this, ask yourself honestly: When is the last time you costed out your recipes?  Do you even have a system that ties recipe ingredients to actual purchases for real time recipe costs? 

To figure out the answers, pull sales reports from your POS system and rank the items sold by the number of covers sold. What is the food cost on your top moving items? 

Now reverse…