Now more than ever digital ordering has become a crucial stream of revenue. The dramatic increase take-out and delivery of food and drink has resulted in an overwhelming amount of information and data. It’s become all the more important to make sense of online sales data to shape the online menu that will deliver.

A platform like toast tab offers information (what’s being ordered by who) that can provide useful insight if you know where to look.

As a start, it’s great to be able to see what menu items and categories are performing well. You’ll want to promote those. And it’s easy enough to see what menu items are performing well versus others; however, if you can identify combinations performing well, you can create bundling specials and promote them. Applying certain statistical techniques to the Menu Item Details report can give you that. Your best combo might include an item that doesn’t excel on its own!

For example, you might identify a group of customers that like the house beer paired with a particular burger and side. You can bundle and promote that combo in your Toast menu. Perhaps, offer special pricing for that combo.

Likewise, you can figure out the tap line-up based on the revenue from orders that include specific beers, rather than how beers hold their own. You might generate more revenue from a beer that sells at a lower volume if customers often purchase that beer with another menu item.

Some restaurants and pubs have started offering subscription-based fulfillment, similar to HelloFresh or Blue Apron, except it’s a theme relevant to the establishment. It could be coffee, pasta, beer—any number of things. By digging into the analytics, you could possibly identify subscription packages: this coffee with this pasta and this desert, for example.

You can’t have your full menu available for digital ordering. So what food, beer, wine, cocktails do you offer? One approach would be to try some items out—whatever you think might work well—and then track the results and tweak the menu according to what is going well and what is not.

That would be a good approach, and you could do more. What would that initial menu look like?

You likely have some good intuition based on your experience. What if you could validate that intuition before releasing? Software companies often use data analysis to figure out what product users would most likely purchase. In many consumer industries, testing is used to identify product configurations that are more likely to succeed than others.

A menu is essentially a product line. Each food and drink item on the menu have different attributes like a product.

One approach, conjoint analysis, can help identify what users may prefer as a group. Not just do I prefer mayo over mustard. But given several options, one group of your customers would rather have a hamburger with mayo and a side of fries over a hamburger with aioli and a side of tater tots. Another group prefers an impossible burger with pickles and a side of sweet potato fries over a bean burger with pickles and a side of tater tots, etc.

What combination of items do large numbers of your customers prefer?

You can find a good starting point through surveys and online focus groups.