Menu engineering in restaurants involves strategically analyzing and designing menus to boost profitability and customer appeal. It categorizes dishes by their sales performance and cost, highlighting top items to improve menu efficiency. AI-powered menu engineering offers real-time analysis of sales data, instantly identifying profitable and popular items while providing recommendations to enhance the performance and profitability of less popular dishes.

Polaris ERP’s AI-Powered menu engineering uses sales data to provide information on what items were most and least sold during a specific period. It also utilizes revenue data to spot the high-profit and low-profit items, as well as cost data to calculate the contribution margins (cost of ingredients and labor), popularity data, and menu item attributes such as pricing, descriptions, and visual presentations to influence customer perception.

By analyzing the profitability and popularity of each menu item, menu engineering enables businesses to identify high-cost, low-margin items that may be contributing to excessive food costs. With this insight, restaurateurs can make strategic decisions such as adjusting portion sizes, substituting ingredients, or eliminating underperforming dishes to optimize their menu for profitability. Additionally, menu engineering allows businesses to strategically price menu items based on their cost and popularity, ensuring that each item contributes positively to overall profitability. Overall, menu engineering empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions that effectively control food costs while maintaining a profitable and competitive menu.

The advantage of AI-powered menu engineering lies in its ability to analyze vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, providing actionable insights to optimize menu offerings for profitability and customer satisfaction. By leveraging AI algorithms, businesses can make data-driven decisions and adapt their menus in real-time to meet changing market demands and consumer preferences.

Based on menu engineering analysis, businesses can make strategic changes such as adjusting menu layouts, optimizing pricing strategies, and revamping menu descriptions to highlight high-profit items and enhance overall profitability. Additionally, menu engineering may prompt businesses to streamline their offerings by removing underperforming items or introducing new dishes based on customer preferences and market trends.

By looking into the data from across sales, revenue, cost, etc., menu engineering is able to provide recommendations on how to boost the menu’s profitability, suggesting menu item combos, chef’s recommendation, or offering rewards and loyalty points to clients ordering specific menu items. It also boosts profitability by cutting operational costs, by suggesting items that can be repurposed, or pointing to the supplier offering the lower prices for specific ingredients to cut costs. Find out more information here.