The matrix is the standard tool of menu engineering and it is genuinely useful. Plot every dish on two axes — how often it sells, and how much margin it makes — and you get four groups, each with a different instruction.
| Quadrant | Popularity | Margin | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | High | High | Protect. Give them the golden triangle, name them well, never discount them. |
| Plough horses | High | Low | Popular but thin. Reduce cost, raise slightly, or attach a high-margin side. |
| Puzzles | Low | High | Good money, nobody orders. Usually a placement or description problem. |
| Dogs | Low | Low | Remove, unless it exists for a reason (a vegan option, a child's dish). |
How to build it without a project
- Export 60–90 days of item-level sales from your POS. A shorter window will be distorted by seasonality.
- Add plate cost per item. Estimates are fine to start — precision matters less than relative ranking.
- Calculate contribution margin: price minus plate cost. Not percentage — cash. A 70% margin on a €4 item loses to 40% on €20.
- Plot against covers sold. Split at the median of each axis, not at an arbitrary number.
- Do it per outlet, never averaged across the property.
Puzzles are where the fast money is
Stars are already working and dogs are a deletion. The interesting quadrant is puzzles: high margin, low sales. Something profitable is being ignored, and the cause is almost always fixable without touching the kitchen.
- It is in a dead zone of the menu — bottom left, or buried under a heading.
- The description is functional rather than appetising.
- It is priced next to something that makes it look expensive.
- Nobody on the floor mentions it, because nobody told them to.
Move one puzzle into the top right, rewrite its description with sensory language, and tell the team to recommend it for a week. That is usually the fastest measurable change available to you.
Where the matrix stops
The matrix tells you which dishes to promote. It says nothing about layout, price architecture, what your servers say, or the outlet that has no menu at all. It is a diagnostic, not a strategy — and on hotel properties the biggest number is often outside the restaurant entirely.