Menu engineering classifies each dish by profitability and popularity into four groups — Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles and Dogs — and prescribes an action for each: protect, re-price, promote or remove.
Items are judged against your own menu average rather than a fixed threshold, which is why the analysis needs a whole menu or a whole category to be meaningful. A handful of items will misclassify.
The standard method weights the margin benchmark by units sold rather than taking a plain average across items, so one expensive dish does not distort the whole matrix.
Example
A popular dish with above-average contribution margin is a Star — protect it. A popular one below average is a Plowhorse — re-cost or re-price it.
Related terms
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