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Free tool · Turnaround

Which dishes make the money?

Your menu sells the wrong items more often than you think. Enter a handful of dishes with price, food cost and how many you sell — see each one classified, and exactly what to do about it.

01

Every dish, classified

Each item placed as a star, plowhorse, puzzle or dog by popularity and contribution margin.

02

What to do with each

Protect, reprice, reposition or cut — the action that lifts the menu, item by item.

03

Where the margin is

See which dishes carry the profit and which quietly drain it, in contribution-margin terms.

Results, measured

We don't trade on logos. We show you the numbers.

Premium engagements are confidential — that discretion is part of what you're buying. What we show openly is exactly how a GGB result is measured; the named, classified outcomes we walk you through in conversation.

Food cost %

Theoretical vs actual, by item and by outlet — usually the fastest margin to recover.

Labour vs sales

Productivity per shift measured against revenue, not a blanket headcount cut.

Delivery economics

Channel mix and menu pricing rebuilt around real aggregator commission.

Payback

Every intervention measured against the capital and the time it takes to return.

Questions

What is menu engineering?
A method that ranks every menu item by two things — how well it sells (popularity) and how much margin it contributes — then groups them into stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs so you know exactly what to do with each.
What do the four categories mean?
Stars sell well and carry strong margin (protect and feature). Plowhorses sell well but thin (reprice or cut cost). Puzzles have strong margin but underselling (reposition or feature). Dogs do neither (rework or remove).
How many items do I need to enter?
At least three for a meaningful comparison; the more representative the set, the better the classification. Use price, food cost and roughly how many you sell a month.
Is contribution margin better than food-cost percentage?
For menu decisions, usually yes. A low food-cost % item can still contribute few dirhams; engineering the menu for total contribution — margin times volume — is what grows profit.
Run the Menu Engineering Matrix