As many restaurants begin to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic, protecting profit has never been more vital. CrunchTime’s new Menu Engineering Analysis tool can optimize your product mix to ensure you're only selling the products your guests love and are profitable.

Simply put, menu engineering is the science of designing a menu mix in a way that maximizes a restaurant's profits. Many restaurants that invest in menu engineering see profits jump by 10-15% or more. It all starts with the specific ingredients that go into making each product and their food cost percentages.

Once the CrunchTime system determines your food costs, it then determines item popularity by gathering a count of each item sold in a given time period. With margin and transaction volume in hand, menu items are then plotted in a menu engineering matrix, categorizing items into one of four categories:

Armed with this data, you will be able to identify the highest and lowest product performers along with ones that have room for improvement. This will aid in the next steps of selecting the best items to delight your guests and maximize profit across all your locations.

So, during this "new normal" time in the restaurant business, get strategic about your menu and keep those profits as high as you can. If you have more questions about menu engineering or food costing and would like to learn about how our customers are optimizing their menus with restaurant management software from CrunchTime, reach out to us.