MENU ANALYSIS - The PUZZLE

PUZZLE – Low Popularity and High Profitability
The puzzle menu items are puzzling to management. They are items that are priced right, but we can’t sell them. The goals is to find a way to make them attractive to the customer.

1. Reposition the item to a prominent location. Prime space is limited, therefore the space needs to be utilized for items that are going to produce a good margin. Four prime locations include: A) Top of a column, B) Bottom of a column, C) Middle of the page, D) Create your own space (through the use of boxes, symbols or text emphasis.

2. Consider renaming the item or ingredients. Perhaps “prunes” don’t sound too romantic to the customer.

3. Consider reworking some of the ingredients. Some items could be tweaked to better emphasis on the vision of the dish.

4. Promote the item through merchandising. Servers can suggestive sell or place the item on a specials board or specials card.

5. Lower the price a tad to test for price sensitivity. The item could sell if the price sounded a bit more attractive. In some cases, the differences between $9.00 and $8.95 is only .05 but to some customers the difference is $1.00.