With the importance of online ordering and the challenge of reduced capacity, you might want to simplify your menu by highlighting your popular and most profitable items. With toast tab and other systems, you can pull data to identify those high margin items that are contributing the most to your profit.

Graphically, those items could be charted:

All items are neatly ordered from most profitable to least profitable items. You could just remove low profit items and keep the high ones.

But you could miss some opportunities to maximize profit.

A matrix-based analysis could uncover those opportunities and drive menu item and marketing decisions. This analysis was first popularized by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for corporate product manages. Many variations have since been applied to different entries, including menu design.

The Toast blog talks about menu design using this concept.

A menu item matrix would something like the graphic below (based on random data for illustrative purposes).

Each section of the matrix represents a category of menu items.

In the upper right are your star items. If your online ordering platform allows you to feature items at the top of the page, these items would go there.

The lower left are the dogs (low volume, thinner margins). These are candidates for dropping from a simplified menu. But be careful that you don’t remove items that are favorites of your regular customers that are also purchasing more profitable items.

The other quadrants are where you might find some of the opportunities for more profit. As an example, you might look at the high profit ratio/low volume items and pair them with a star to increase sales. A cluster analysis (explained here) of orders and similar analyses can show you what menu items are already being ordered together. These sort of analyses can also provide insight into your regular customers and their profitability.

A menu item matrix can be a powerful decision-making tool to makeover or simply tweak your menu to be more effective and driving more profit.