Recipe costing and menu engineering

Purpose

Show which menu items create value, which consume margin, and what price or placement decisions the available data supports.

Scope

Food and beverage recipes, ingredient costs, yield and waste assumptions, sales volumes, and menu prices. Excluded: purchasing, recipe execution, and final pricing approval.

Data basis

• Recipes, supplier prices, yield or waste factors, sales history, current menu prices, and target margin settings.
• The fixed records, tables, or folders in the skill scope that hold the relevant history or schema.

Result

A costing sheet, four-quadrant menu analysis, and item-level pricing or placement recommendations.

Quality criteria

• Every costed item has quantities, units, yield basis, and source prices.
• Portion cost and contribution are mathematically reproducible.
• Items are classified using the configured popularity and contribution rules.
• Recommendations state the supporting metric and any assumption.
• Missing recipe or price data is listed rather than silently estimated.

Instructions

Normalize purchase units to recipe units while preserving the conversion. Separate ingredient cost, waste, packaging, and other included cost components. Use the company’s target margin and classification thresholds. Do not treat low sales as a reason to remove an item without considering strategic or operational constraints. Round only in the display layer, not in calculations.

Adapt before use

Keep the source trail close to every conclusion and preserve the difference between a source fact, a calculated value, an assumption, and a recommendation. Use stable identifiers across the document and sheet so a reviewer can move from a summary statement to the underlying row and source. Prefer a complete, transparent partial result over a confident answer built on missing evidence.

• Add the recipe, sales, and price schemas with unit conventions.
• Set target margin, popularity, and waste assumptions.
• Define which costs belong in the portion-cost calculation.
• Specify menu categories or strategic items exempt from automatic recommendations.