Changing a cafe menu without losing money

A menu change feels like a creative decision. Most of its consequences are operational, and they land on people who were not in the room.

The kitchen gains prep, the storeroom gains lines, and food cost moves before anybody measures it.

Cost every new dish before it reaches a board

A dish priced by feel usually lands within a dollar of the right number. A dollar on a popular dish is most of its margin.

Each dish costs out from current supplier prices, including the garnish and the oil. Our guide to food cost percentage covers doing that one dish at a time.

Count the new ingredients a menu brings with it

Every new ingredient carries an order, a shelf, a use by date and a risk of waste. One dish with three unique ingredients costs more than its recipe suggests.

The dishes worth adding share ingredients you already carry. A menu built that way wastes less and orders more simply, with no loss to the customer.

Change a few lines, not the whole board

A full relaunch changes everything at once, so nothing tells you what worked. The team also learns twelve new dishes in a week.

Three or four dishes at a time is the right size of change. Each one gets a fair test, and your kitchen keeps its speed while it learns them.

Watch what sells, and what it earns

Sales alone mislead. Your best selling dish can be your worst earner, and the quiet one at the bottom can carry the section.

Hold units sold against margin per dish. Four groups appear: popular and profitable, popular and thin, quiet and profitable, quiet and thin.

• Popular and profitable. Protect these and never change the recipe quietly.
• Popular and thin. Reprice or re engineer the plate, because volume makes it urgent.
• Quiet and profitable. You move it up the menu, or describe it better.
• Quiet and thin. You remove it, and its unique ingredients leave with it.

Tell the kitchen before the customers

A dish that reaches the board before the prep sheet produces a bad first week. Your kitchen needs the recipe, the yield and the plate photograph beforehand.

A dish sells best in its first fortnight, so a shaky launch wastes the only free attention it gets.

Fix a review date when you launch

A new dish stays on the menu for years unless somebody looks. A date six weeks out, with the numbers read on it, settles that.

Six weeks gives you real sales and a settled kitchen. Anything decided in week one measures novelty rather than demand.

Photograph the plate before it reaches the pass

A dish drifts within a month. The garnish shrinks, the portion creeps, and nobody notices because it happens a little at a time.

Your kitchen keeps one photograph of the correct plate for every dish. A new starter then matches a picture rather than asking.

It protects your costing as well. A portion that grew ten per cent moved your food cost, and the photograph is what catches it.

A photograph settles arguments between shifts as well. Two chefs plating differently is invisible to them and obvious to a regular customer.

What to change first

• Every new dish costs out from current supplier prices before it reaches the board
• Dishes that share ingredients you already carry come first
• Three or four lines change at a time, not the whole board
• Units sold against margin sorts every dish into the four groups
• The kitchen gets the recipe, the yield and the photograph first
• A review date six weeks out gets set on the day of the launch