Menu engineering is usually talked about as a profitability tool—highlight high-margin items, de-emphasise dogs, that sort of thing. But every menu decision also affects waste. The dishes you promote, the portions you set, the ingredients you share across items all shape how much ends up in the bin.
Done well, menu engineering improves both margins and waste. The two aren't in conflict.
The Classic Framework
Traditional menu engineering plots items on two axes:
Popularity: How often an item sells relative to other items.
Profitability: The contribution margin (selling price minus food cost).
This creates four quadrants:
- Stars: High popularity, high profitability. Promote these.
- Puzzles: Low popularity, high profitability. Try to sell more.
- Plowhorses: High popularity, low profitability. Reengineer or reprice.
- Dogs: Low popularity, low profitability. Consider removing.
This framework is decades old and still useful. But it doesn't directly account for waste.
Adding Waste to the Matrix
A waste-conscious approach adds a third dimension: waste impact.
Some dishes inherently generate more waste than others. A whole-fish preparation produces more prep waste than a fish fillet. A composed salad that customers pick at produces more plate waste than a simple green salad they finish.
Consider your quadrants through a waste lens:
High-waste stars. Profitable and popular but generating disproportionate waste. Can you reengineer the dish to reduce waste without sacrificing appeal?
High-waste dogs. Unpopular, unprofitable, and wasteful. Remove these immediately.
Low-waste plowhorses. Popular and efficient, just not profitable. These might deserve more attention than traditional analysis suggests.
Not every dish needs to be low-waste. But the menu overall should balance waste across items.
Ingredient Cross-Utilisation
The biggest menu engineering lever for waste is ingredient overlap. Every unique ingredient is a spoilage risk. Every item that uses common ingredients reduces that risk.
Review your menu for:
Orphan ingredients. Items that appear in only one dish. If that dish doesn't sell, the ingredient spoils.
Protein utilisation. Are you using whole animals or primals? Butchery creates trim—is that trim appearing elsewhere on the menu?
Vegetable utilisation. Stems, leaves, peels—are they waste or ingredients?
A well-engineered menu uses each ingredient in multiple preparations. A poorly-engineered one has dozens of unique items with limited overlap.
Portion Calibration
Plate waste often signals portion problems. The data tells you which dishes come back uneaten:
Consistent plate returns on specific items. The portion is too large or there's an unloved component (the garnish no one eats, the side that doesn't belong).
Returns correlating with customer type. Lunch versus dinner guests might need different portions. Business travellers versus families have different appetites.
Specific components returning. If the protein gets eaten but the starch comes back, you're over-portioning the starch.
Portion calibration isn't about making everything smaller. It's about matching what you serve to what gets eaten.
Side Dish Strategy
Sides are often the highest-waste component of a meal. Customers feel obligated to take them, then don't eat them.
Options to consider:
Sides as ordered items, not automatic inclusions. Customers choose what they actually want.
Shareable side portions. For tables, larger portions to share instead of individual portions that half-go uneaten.
Reducing side variety. Fewer side options means better forecasting and fresher product.
The €2 side that costs €0.60 and gets thrown away half the time isn't actually profitable. Do the maths including waste.
Specials and Waste Management
Daily specials have two purposes in a waste-conscious kitchen:
Using what you have. Excess inventory, items approaching use-by, trim and offcuts become features rather than waste.
Testing new items. Before adding something permanent, trial it as a special to gauge demand.
A kitchen with good waste visibility can build specials around what's in danger of being wasted. Tuesday's special is fish because the fish delivery was larger than needed. Wednesday's special is a vegetable soup because the veg trim bin is full.
Menu Complexity Trade-offs
Larger menus create more waste. More SKUs mean more spoilage risk, more forecasting error, more partial portions of things that don't get used.
But menu reduction affects customer appeal. There's a balance.
Consider:
- How many items truly drive sales? Often 20% of items generate 80% of revenue.
- Which items share ingredients versus require unique components?
- What's the minimum viable menu for your concept?
Reducing from 50 items to 40 might not affect sales while significantly reducing waste. Reducing from 40 to 15 might hurt customer satisfaction. The right size depends on your operation.
Making Changes Stick
Menu engineering is useless as a one-off exercise. Build waste consideration into your regular menu review:
- Quarterly sales mix analysis including waste data
- Annual menu overhaul with waste as an explicit criterion
- Pre-launch waste assessment for new items
- Post-service feedback loop from kitchen to menu planning
The menu shapes kitchen operations. Getting it right reduces waste before it happens.
See how menu optimisation affects your savings, or talk to us about waste assessment including menu analysis.