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Menu Profit Calculator Lite

Play with tweaks, from price rises to portion sizes, and discover their effect on your bottom line. A quick way to see how small changes lead to big gains.

Currency:
GBP

Menu Item Details

£
Skip this to see revenue impact only. For live profit tracking with auto-updated costs, join Brikly
£
Cost per portion: £0.65
Current Margin:79.5%
VAT:20.00% VAT
per month
Enter the expected number of units sold per month

Adjust Menu Item

Target Margin Calculator

%
portions
+£0.20 from base
Net price per portion (excl. vat): £3.17
VAT (20.00% VAT): £0.63

Results

New Margin
79.5%

Impact Analysis

Revenue Impact (ex. VAT)
+£500.38
per year
Profit Impact (ex. VAT)
+£500.38
per year

Per Portion Breakdown

Selling price:£3.80
Selling price (ex. vat):£3.17
Cost:£0.65
Profit (ex. vat):£2.52

Batch Summary

Batch size:10 portions
Total revenue:£38.00
Total cost:£6.50
Total profit:£31.50

Like this? The full version runs on live data.

In Brikly, your costs and sales update automatically from your POS and invoices - no data entry needed. Swap ingredients, test prices, and instantly see the impact on profit.

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How menu engineering actually works

Menu engineering is the discipline of analysing every dish on your menu by two independent dimensions: how often it sells (popularity) and how much profit each sale contributes (contribution margin). Cross those two and every dish lands in one of four quadrants. The decision you make about a dish depends on which quadrant it sits in, not on your gut feel about whether you like it.

This calculator lets you test the second dimension. Enter a dish’s ingredient cost and selling price, then change one variable at a time, raise the price by 5%, shrink the portion by 10%, swap an ingredient, to see exactly how contribution margin and gross margin move.

Contribution margin vs gross margin: the difference matters

Two numbers, often confused. Both belong on every menu engineering decision.

  • Contribution margin is selling price minus variable cost (ingredient cost, in food terms). It is the £ each sale puts toward fixed costs and profit. A dish at £9.00 selling price with £2.70 ingredient cost has £6.30 contribution margin.
  • Gross margin % is contribution margin divided by selling price. Same dish: 70% gross margin. Useful for comparing dishes against each other and against benchmarks.

A common mistake: optimising for the highest margin % only. A 80% margin dish that sells 5 times a day contributes less to your business than a 65% margin dish that sells 40 times a day. Both numbers, always.

The four menu engineering quadrants

  • Stars (high margin, high volume). Your hero dishes. Protect them. Promote them on the menu’s prime real estate. Don’t mess with the recipe.
  • Plowhorses (low margin, high volume). Popular but not earning enough. Test a small price rise (5–10%), reduce portion size by 5%, or swap a costly ingredient. Volume protects you on small changes.
  • Puzzles (high margin, low volume). Profitable but ignored. Either the menu position is wrong, the description is bland, or staff aren’t recommending it. Marketing fix, not a recipe fix.
  • Dogs (low margin, low volume). Reconsider, replace, or remove. They’re crowding your menu without earning their slot.

How to use this calculator to test scenarios

Three scenarios most operators should test on every dish in their menu:

  1. Price up 5%. What happens to gross margin? In most cases the margin jumps several percentage points and the customer barely notices. This is the cheapest optimisation in hospitality.
  2. Portion down 10%. Often invisible to the customer when reduced cleanly (one less slice, one fewer chip). The cost saving compounds across thousands of covers a year.
  3. Swap one expensive ingredient. Standard cheddar instead of mature cheddar, sunflower oil instead of rapeseed. Test the margin lift before testing the taste.

For deeper guides see how to set menu prices that protect margins, sales mix and the Pareto rule for cafe menus, and POS data vs recipe costing.

Frequently asked questions

What is menu engineering?

Menu engineering is the practice of analysing every item on your menu by two dimensions: how well it sells (popularity) and how much profit it generates (contribution margin). Items are classified as Stars (high profit, high sales), Puzzles (high profit, low sales), Plowhorses (low profit, high sales), or Dogs (low profit, low sales). The goal is to promote Stars, reprice Plowhorses, market Puzzles, and reconsider Dogs.

How do you calculate menu item profitability?

Menu item profitability = selling price (ex-VAT) minus the total ingredient cost. To get the gross margin percentage, divide the profit by the selling price and multiply by 100. For example, if a dish sells for £9.00 ex-VAT and costs £2.70 in ingredients, the gross profit is £6.30 and the margin is 70%.

How much should I charge for a menu item?

A common approach is to target a food cost percentage of 28–35%. Divide your ingredient cost by your target food cost percentage to get the minimum selling price. If a dish costs £3.00 and you target 30% food cost, the minimum price is £10.00. Then adjust based on what customers will pay, competitor pricing, and the perceived value of the dish.

What is a good food cost percentage for a cafe?

UK cafes typically target 25–32% food cost on food items and 15–22% on drinks. Bakery items often sit at 20–28%. The blended average across a well-run cafe menu is usually around 28–30%. However, individual items vary widely, the key is knowing your margin on each dish, not just the overall average.