How can menu engineering help me decide which items to remove or promote?

Menu engineering helps you decide which items to remove or promote by evaluating each dish or drink based on two clear factors: profitability and popularity. When you measure both at the same time, you can see which items deserve more visibility, which need adjustment, and which may no longer justify space on your menu.

What Menu Engineering Actually Measures

In most restaurants, menu engineering is widely applied to compare items within the same category, such as starters against starters or cocktails against cocktails. The goal is to avoid relying on assumptions and instead use real sales data.

• Profitability: How much gross profit the item generates per sale (selling price minus food or beverage cost)
• Popularity: How often the item sells compared to other items in the same section

Once you combine these two numbers, every item falls into one of four standard groups.

The Four Categories That Guide Decisions

1. High Profit, High Popularity

These are your strongest performers. They generate solid margins and sell consistently.

In practice, these items are usually promoted through better placement, server recommendations, or visual highlights on the menu.

2. High Profit, Low Popularity

These items make good money but are not ordered often.

The decision is rarely to remove them immediately. Instead, restaurants typically improve descriptions, reposition them on the menu, adjust pricing slightly, or train staff to suggest them more actively.

3. Low Profit, High Popularity

These sell well but do not contribute strong margins.

Common actions include reviewing portion size, renegotiating supplier costs, modest price increases, or bundling with higher-margin items.

4. Low Profit, Low Popularity

These are usually the first candidates for removal. They take up space, complicate operations, and rarely justify their cost.

Before removing them, it is standard practice to confirm they are not strategically important, such as a signature dish or a menu anchor.

How It Is Typically Done in Restaurants

The process is straightforward and commonly repeated every few months:

• Export sales data for a set period, often 30 to 90 days
• Calculate gross profit for each item
• Rank items by sales volume within their category
• Assign each item to one of the four groups
• Decide on action: promote, adjust, rework, or remove

A café, for example, might discover that a specialty latte has strong margins but low sales. Instead of removing it, they might feature it seasonally or highlight it visually. A bar may identify a slow-moving cocktail with weak margins and remove it to simplify prep and speed up service.

How Digital Menus Can Support These Decisions

Digital menu systems make these adjustments easier because changes can be tested quickly. Instead of reprinting menus, you can reposition items, add visual emphasis, or temporarily hide low performers.

Platforms like Menuviel, for example, allow restaurants to manage item visibility, highlight featured dishes, and update descriptions from a single dashboard. This makes it practical to apply menu engineering decisions without operational disruption.

Used consistently, menu engineering turns menu changes into structured decisions rather than guesswork, helping you focus attention on items that truly support profitability and operational efficiency.