13d • Money Saving
Is your menu Bleeding cash?
As a restaurant owner, you know your busiest dishes. The burger that flies out of the kitchen on a Friday night, the wings on game day.
But here’s the hard truth I learned the hard way: High volume doesn't mean high profit.
You could be selling 500 burgers a week, but if your margin on them is razor-thin, you're just churning out work for pennies. Meanwhile, that pasta dish you only sell 20 times a week might be your actual goldmine.
How do you fix this? It's called Menu Engineering. It used to take hours of spreadsheets and math.
Now, you can do it in 5 minutes with AI.
Here is the exact method to find your menu's "hidden gold" and ditch the losers.
The 4 Types of Dishes on Every Menu
Every single item you sell falls into one of these four boxes:
- ⭐ Stars: High Profit & High Popularity. (These are your champions. Keep them, highlight them.)
- 🐴 Plowhorses: Low Profit & High Popularity. (You sell a ton, but make little. Action: Raise the price slightly or lower the food cost.)
- 🧩 Puzzles: High Profit & Low Popularity. (Great margin, but nobody buys them. Action: Rename it, take a better photo, or move it to a better spot on the menu.)
- 🐕 Dogs: Low Profit & Low Popularity. (Why is this here? Action: Ditch it to speed up your kitchen.)
Your 5-Minute AI Audit
You don't need to be a mathematician to figure this out. Let AI do the heavy lifting.
Step 1: Grab Your Data Take just one section of your menu (e.g., Appetizers or Mains) from last month's POS report. You just need four numbers for each item:
- Item Name
- Quantity Sold
- Food Cost (rough estimate is fine for now)
- Selling Price
Step 2: The "Menu Master" Prompt Copy and paste the prompt below into ChatGPT or Claude. Then, paste your data list underneath it.
[PASTE THIS PROMPT]
Act as a professional Restaurant Menu Engineer. I am going to provide you with a list of menu items from one section of my menu. For each item, I have the Name, Quantity Sold last month, Cost to make, and Selling Price.
Please analyze this data to categorize my items.
- First, calculate the Gross Profit per item (Selling Price - Cost).
- Based on the quantity sold and gross profit, categorize each item into one of four groups:
- Create a simple table showing each item, its category, and its gross profit.
- Finally, give me one specific, actionable recommendation for my top "Plowhorse" (to increase its profit) and one for my top "Puzzle" (to increase its sales).
Here is my data:
[PASTE YOUR LIST HERE. Example format: Burger: 250 sold, $6 cost, $16 price Wings: 180 sold, $8 cost, $14 price Pasta: 40 sold, $4 cost, $22 price]
Step 3: Take Action
The AI will spit out a clear table. Look at your Plowhorses. These are your biggest opportunity. Can you raise the price by just $1? Or swap an ingredient to save $0.50?
If you sell 500 of those a month, a $1 price increase is $500 in pure profit straight to your bottom line, just for changing a number on a menu.
Give this a try today with just five items. You'll be shocked at what you find.
P.S. This is a quick-and-dirty way to do it. Want a more solid way to do it. Then Join our VIP Group where we go deeper in these topics.
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Is your menu Bleeding cash?
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