Which Dishes on Your Menu Actually Turn a Profit (and Which to Cut)

Your menu has 30, maybe 40 dishes. It grew over the years: a dish customers kept requesting, a suggestion from the chef, that starter that came in for summer and never left. It's never been cleaned up. And chances are, right now, some of those dishes are losing you money without you knowing it.

Dish profitability is the question almost no owner asks. Not "which dish sells the most," but "which dish makes the most profit." It's rarely the same one. This article shows how to find the difference, and what to do with it.

The four types of dish on your menu (without you knowing it)

Every dish has two traits that matter: how many times it sells and how much margin it leaves per sale. Cross the two, and any menu splits into four groups.

• Sells a lot and leaves a good margin. These are your champions. They pay the rent. Almost nobody knows exactly which dishes they are.
• Sells a lot and leaves little. They fly out of the kitchen all day, but the margin is thin. Lots of work, little result.
• Sells little but leaves a good margin. They have hidden potential. What they're missing is visibility on the menu or a recommendation from staff.
• Sells little and leaves little. They take up space on the menu, in the walk-in, and in the kitchen's head. They're probably not worth keeping.

Most owners can tell you which dish sells the most. Almost none can tell you which group each of the other 35 falls into.

Why your best-selling dish might be your worst deal

Picture your star dish. It sells 200 times a month. Everyone orders it. It looks like the best deal in the house.

But the main ingredient is shrimp, and shrimp has gone up in price three times in the last six months. The recipe hasn't changed, neither has the selling price, and the margin has been shrinking without anyone noticing. Today, every plate leaves you €2 of margin. Across 200 sales, that's €400 a month.

Now think about that oven-baked dish that sells 30 times a month. Nobody pays it much attention. But the ingredient cost is low and the margin is €9 per plate. Across 30 sales, that's €270.

The star dish still earns more overall, of course. But the gap is much smaller than it looks, and it's shrinking because of one ingredient that keeps rising. If nothing changes, three months from now the champion could be earning less than the dish nobody values. Without looking at the numbers, you'd never notice.

How to measure dish profitability

To know which group each dish belongs to, you need three things:

1. The real cost of each dish. Not an estimate from when you built the menu. The current price of each ingredient, as it stands today on your suppliers' invoices.
2. The selling price. That one you already know.
3. How many times it sells. The number of times each dish went out during the month.

With the cost and the price, you get the margin per dish. Multiplied by how many times it sells, you get that dish's total contribution to your month.

Watch out for a common mix-up: margin as a percentage and contribution in euros are not the same thing. A dish can have an excellent food cost percentage and still contribute little because it barely sells. Another can have a thin margin but contribute a lot because of volume. You need to look at both numbers at once, and that's where most people lose the thread.

The real work isn't the math. It's keeping ingredient costs up to date. Prices change every week, and a menu that was costed once and never reviewed again is lying to you.

What to do with each type of dish

Knowing which group each dish falls into is only worth something if you act on it. For each type, the move is different.

• Champions (sells a lot, good margin): protect them. Keep the recipe and the supplier consistent. Don't touch the price unless you need to, but watch the ingredient cost closely.
• Popular (sells a lot, thin margin): here a small adjustment has a big impact. Raising the price by €0.50 or swapping an expensive ingredient for an alternative, on a dish that sells 200 times, changes your month. This is the group most worth working on.
• Up-and-coming (sells little, good margin): don't cut them. Give them visibility. Put them at the top of the menu, turn them into a dish of the day, train staff to recommend them. Selling more of these improves your overall margin without spending a cent.
• To review (sells little, thin margin): rework the recipe or cut them. Every extra dish on the menu means more idle stock, more waste, and more prep time. A shorter menu is usually a more profitable menu.

You don't need to do it all at once. Start with the popular ones and the ones to review. That's where the easiest money is.

How Tinz shows you dish profitability

Doing this by hand is the kind of task that always gets left for later: opening each recipe, updating the price of every ingredient, cross-referencing with sales, dish by dish.

In Tinz, the Operations section handles this using the data you already have. On the Menu tab, the cost of each dish is calculated automatically using the real ingredient prices from your invoices, with a color alert on each dish's margin. The Analysis button classifies your entire menu into the four groups (Champions, Popular, Up-and-coming, and To review) and gives you a recommendation for each dish. And if you import your POS sales report on the Sales tab, the cross-reference between cost and popularity happens on its own, with prices always up to date as you log new invoices.

You can try Tinz free for 14 days, no credit card required, at https://app.mytinz.com/#/register?plan=pro.