A restaurant operator shares how Donald taught menu engineering to cut food costs. It's not about raising prices, but tracking what each dish costs to make, seeing what actually sells in your POS data, and moving high-margin items like Italian meatballs to the front while burying expensive low-sellers.
What you've taught us, Donald, is that. And I've always had low food cost, but you actually helped me before inflation kicked in. We were running at 10.8. You were super low for a while. Yeah. And what you did to get us there was that you actually taught us how to menu. Engineer the menu, right? Everyone you hear, oh, you've got to engineer your menu and blah, blah, blah. That's not about putting a freaking dollar on everything. That's just. That's crap. It's lazy. That's lazy. That's laz. That's definitely lazy. That's lazy. It's looking at your point of sale sales for the the month or the quarter and then analyzing what sells and what doesn't sell. But before you do that, you have to know what everything cost you. And then if something's got a high food cost and it's not selling much, piss it off. If something's got a high food cost and you're selling too much of it, you've got to bury it in the menu. So I'm going to find it, right? And then you've got to find stuff that has got very, very low food cost, right? And then you've got to put that in a place where that is what you sell. So when we like our Italian meatballs is a plea byproduct, right. We have, we have marketed the out of that, so it actually has become one of our biggest sellers.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
