How recipe and menu engineering guarantees restaurants maximise profits 

A well-thought-out and strategically designed menu makes a world of difference.

Recipe and menu engineering is a fundamental factor in the overall success of a restaurant. Unknown to many, RME helps restaurants maximise their profit by providing calculations of priced ingredients and suggesting which items would be best placed on the menu. 

Getting it right involves analysing the menu marketing and sales, including categorising menu items based on profitability and popularity, balancing high food cost items with low food cost items to maximise business profit. With a well-thought-out and strategically designed menu, QSRs are able to increase sales traffic, encourage more customer visits, and better satisfy their customers. 

What is recipe and menu engineering? 

Recipe and menu engineering refers to using a scientific approach to designing a profitable menu to increase business revenue. It includes menu appeal for the customer and balances the high and low food cost items so that QSRs can gain strategic cost control over their profit margins. 

By ensuring that prices are consistent across each category, restaurant owners make it easier for customers to order by knowing exactly what is expected. 

Meanwhile, Fourth's Menu, Nutrition, and Allergen Publishing feature to publicise recipes, menus, and allergens in various locations—websites, customer-facing displays such as tablets, and even third-party applications.

This allows restaurants to calculate and manage the nutritional content of their recipes, as well as the allergens in each dish. With this solution, QSRs can automatically generate allergen and nutritional information for each menu item, making it easier to comply with food labelling regulations.

Recipe and menu engineering solutions 

When it comes to the intricate world of QSRs, a successful menu engineering campaign is the key to profitability and sustainable business growth. A recipe and menu engineering solution helps QSRs address key challenges including business profitability, recipe cost controls, product volumes forecast, recipe standardisation, ingredient profitability, and nutritional information. 

With a deep understanding of the said challenges, Fourth’s Recipe and Menu Engineering (RME) solutions provide QSRs with accurate cost calculation that helps remove the guesswork around menu engineering analysis and pricing. 

Fourth’s recipe management tool creates comprehensive Recipe Cards that can be printed or displayed digitally, reducing printing and paper costs for the QSRs as well as making it easier to access nutritional and intolerance-related information. It also stores nutrition and intolerance data against ingredients, and automatically recalculates recipe costs when changes are made to recipes. 

Another feature of Fourth's RME is its Application Programming Interface (API) for vendors to automatically supply nutritional values that are compatible with dietary restrictions. These values can replace costly laboratory charges for determining nutrition. 

To help QSRs with recipe standardisation, especially those with multiple locations, Fourth uses a central data repository to monitor and maintain all recipes, and a central library for shared access to recipes for consistency in all locations. 

Final Thoughts 

All in all, recipe and menu engineering is a vital component to consider in menu design and marketing. For many restaurant owners and managers, menu engineering will become an essential and integral part of their total restaurant concept.  

Fourth’s RME comes as a standalone feature but will eventually be integrated with MacromatiX in 2023, as they continue revolutionising their product to serve you better.  

Visit http://www.fourth.com/en-au or email [email protected] to schedule a demo, learn more, or ask questions.