Every menu has four kinds of item on it. Most owners can name the bestseller and the one nobody orders, but not which bestseller is quietly losing money. This tool plots each item by how often it sells against what it contributes, then says plainly what to do with it.
| Item | Category | Price | Food cost | Sold | Margin | Cost % |
|---|
Contribution margin is price minus food cost — what one sale actually leaves behind before rent and wages. It is not the same as margin percentage, and the difference matters: a 70% margin on a cheap item can contribute less rupiah than a 45% margin on an expensive one.
Menu mix is an item's share of total units sold. The vertical line sits at (1 ÷ number of items) × 70%, the Kasavana & Smith convention. With twelve items, average share is 8.3%, so anything above 5.8% counts as popular. Raise the slider to judge the menu more harshly.
The horizontal line is the weighted average contribution margin across every unit sold, not a plain average of the items — so a high-margin item nobody orders cannot drag the benchmark upward.
The four names come from Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith's 1982 menu engineering framework, still the standard method in hospitality costing.
Two honest limits. This looks at food cost only — it ignores prep time, equipment tie-up, waste and shelf life, so a dish that takes twenty minutes of a cook's attention looks identical to one that is plated in thirty seconds. And it says nothing about why an item sells: menu placement, wording, staff recommendation and photography all move the numbers before any recipe changes.
Treat the output as the first question, not the last answer. The quadrant tells you where to look; the kitchen tells you what is really going on.