Marscafe LogoMenu Engineering
Another Marscafe Web Resource Document

"MENU ENGINEERING" DEMO GENERATOR


After reading the background and introductory information presented on this page, To use this demo:

First, enter your Contact Information below
Second, complete the "MENU ENGINEERING WORKSHEET DATA INPUT FORM" on the bottom of the page. If you have actual sales history data, feel free to use it. Because this is a DEMO, I have limited the input to 5 menu items.
Third, "submit to return DEMO results"



The Results will be ::
  1. A Menu Engineering Worksheet generated on your computer screen
  2. Worksheet Data emailed to you with a detailed explanation about Menu Engineering.

Try to be as realistic with you input data as you can, based on your experience and history of doing things.


Contact Information


__ Enter Your Name (required):

__ Enter Your E-mail Address (required):

__ Job Occupation (required):


This is a DEMO version of an online, web accessible, Menu Engineering Worksheet Generator. It uses proprietary computations and conditional logic combined with my education and twenty years of hotel, resort and restaurant experience.

For this DEMO, as with the Restaurant Covers Forecasting DEMO, we return to "The Nighthawks Cafe" The table below gives some historical operational information for "The Nighthawks Cafe", which is a small up scale restaurant now serves both lunch and dinner and does occasional catering-banquets for nearby office buildings.

Although not a large restaurant operation, "The Nighthawks Cafe" has been quite successful. However both the chef and the general manager feel that the operation would be more efficient and profitable with a major menu revision and they know they will need to do a through Menu Analysis.

"The Nighthawks Cafe" has, over the years, kept a good history of its covers (sales), but has not put those numbers to work in an organized, systematic and tactical manner. Putting that sales/covers history data to work using a Menu Engineering Worksheet to analyze the current menu and come up with a new one is what this DEMO is about. Menu engineering is an empirically-driven, deterministic approach for the evaluation of current and possible future menu pricing, design and content decisions.

Menu Engineering is an analytical process that focuses on the monetary difference between each item’s selling price and its food cost. This monetary difference is critical and is termed "CONTRIBUTION MARGIN." CONTRIBUTION MARGIN is the core driver of menu engineering. (For a primer on Contribution Margin and Break Even analysis click here)
While a menu item's contribution margin tells us how many dollars each individual sale of the item contributes to the gross profit, you need to know how popular the item is to determine the total dollars it contributes to the restaurant’s monthly gross profit, and the Menu Engineering worksheet provides that information. Menu Engineering is a method of evaluating every item on your menu relative to its present contribution to bottom line dollars, thereby allowing managers to recognize the items they want to sell, increase the price, lower the price or replace.


NIGHTHAWKS' CAFE GENERAL BACKGROUND OPERATING INFORMATION
Type of OperationCasual Service · lunch, dinner, carryout, catering
LocationChicago, IL & · near a business district and a shopping mall
Lunchfrom 11:30 am to 2:30 pm Monday - Sunday
Dinnerfrom 6:00 pm to 11:00 pm Monday - Sunday
Days ClosedChristmass Eve (dinner) || Christmass Day (lunch and dinner) || New year Day (lunch and dinner)
Seating Capacity85
p
Dinning Room TurnsMaximum = 2 // Average = 1.4 // Acceptable = 1.35
Sales/Covers HistoryUsing up to the Last 5 years
Busiest to Slowest Day of the WeekFriday · Saturday · Thursday · Wednesday · Sunday · Monday · Tuesday
Busiest to Slowest Month of the YearMay · June · July · April · August · October · September · November · December · March · January · February

Keeping your food cost on target, as important as it is, does not necessarily mean that you are maximizing the potential profit from your menu. At the end of the financial accounting cascade, or at the bottom of all the lines, what determines how much profit there will be is the "Gross Profit", or "Contribution Margin" of the menu items. Let's look at an example from the Nighthawks Cafe Menu:

Nighthawk Burger
- costs $3.50
- sells for $10.00
- contribution margin $6.50

Chicken of the Night
- costs $4.00
- sells for $12.00
- contribution margin $8.00

In other words, each "Chicken of the Night" sold, compared to the "Nighthawk Burger" brings in an additional $1.50 in contribution margin or gross profit. Multiply that by a hundred per month and we have $150.00 more in gross profit to help cover the operating expenses than we would have had if we had sold 100 Nighthawk Burgers instead.

MENU ENGINEERING WORKSHEET DATA INPUT FORM.
Please Do Not Use The Dollar/$ Sign.
Decimal Points Are OK
all 5 items must be fully completed
Item Name
example: NY Strip Steak		 Number Sold
example: 14		 Food Cost (no $)
example: 5.27		 Menu Price (no $)
example: 19.00


If you are ready then ...