Menu Profitability Report

Status

About this report

This report computes food cost %, contribution margin ($ and %), and item velocity (units sold) per menu item. Based on this data, the report classifies every item into the classic menu-engineering matrix — Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, Dogs — based on popularity vs. profitability and renders an HTML dashboard with a quadrant scatter plot and other helpful illustrations. See below for actionable menu engineering notes such as reprice, reformulate, remove, promote.

Active menu items

$8.98

Menu avg. contribution margin / unit

Items flagged over food-cost target

Popularity vs. profitability quadrant

Each dot is a menu item, sized by revenue. Position (not color) determines the quadrant - the shaded zone and label name it directly. A red-ringed dot means the item's food cost % breaches its category target; see the notes list below.

Menu items

Item	Category	Quadrant	Units sold	Revenue	Food cost %	Contribution margin
Chicken Chop	Main Course	Puzzle	4517	$174,160.83	33.6%	$27.78 (66.4%)
Kaya Toast Set	Appetizers	Star	10374	$124,095.32	25.6%	$9.25 (74.4%)
Beef Rendang	Main Course	Puzzle	2391	$106,039.97	35.2%	$31.75 (64.8%)
Spaghetti Carbonara flagged	Main Course	Puzzle	2458	$100,906.22	36.2%	$30.89 (63.8%)
Nasi Lemak	Main Course	Plowhorse	9209	$100,478.37	28.3%	$8.42 (71.7%)
Cendol	Desserts	Plowhorse	7269	$65,259.26	26.3%	$7.12 (73.7%)
Teh Tarik	Beverages	Plowhorse	15535	$59,911.05	17.3%	$3.36 (82.6%)
Mushroom Soup	Appetizers	Puzzle	2518	$45,369.09	28.1%	$13.75 (71.9%)
Iced Lemon Tea	Beverages	Plowhorse	6841	$34,244.32	19.3%	$4.35 (80.7%)

Food cost % by category

Items to review

Spaghetti Carbonara (Main Course) - Food cost 36% is 3% over the 33% target for Main Course - consider a price increase, portion adjustment, or recipe re-costing.

Metric definitions

Food cost %: The estimated cost of ingredients for one serving, divided by its selling price. Lower means more margin per sale. Estimated here from configurable category benchmarks, not audited invoices - see the admin Settings page.
Contribution margin: Selling price minus estimated plate cost - the dollars each sale contributes toward overheads and profit after ingredient cost. Shown both in dollars and as a percentage of price.
Popularity index: An item's share of total units sold. Compared against "fair share" (1 / number of menu items) to decide whether an item is a high or low seller.
Stars: High popularity, high profitability. Protect these - keep quality and visibility high.
Plowhorses: High popularity, low profitability. Popular but thin margins - consider a price or cost adjustment.
Puzzles: Low popularity, high profitability. Profitable but underordered - consider repositioning on the menu or better promotion.
Dogs: Low popularity, low profitability. Candidates for recipe rework or removal.

Development notes

This application consists of a data importer, metrics/analytics engine, and this live web app. It was built as a deliberately gated, three-phase build (data import → metrics/analytics engine → web app).

A small pre-built dataset (the Kaggle CSV's richest-menu restaurant) is committed to the repo and copied into place automatically the first time the app runs against a DATABASE_PATH that doesn't exist yet. A newer export refresh, or a different location, can be imported using the functionality embedded in the application.

Tech stack

This project uses Python 3, Flask, SQLite, Jinja2, Chart.js, python-dotenv, gunicorn, and pytest.

Restaurant Menu Profitability Report