03/06/2026
Menu engineering sounds fancy. It’s not.
It’s just two questions per item:
1. Does it sell?
2. Does it make money?
Plot every menu item on those two axes and you get four categories:
★ sell well, make money. Push these.
🐎 sell well, low margin. Re-price or re-cost.
🧩 high margin, low sales. Reposition or promote.
🐕 low sales, low margin. Cut them.
Most cafés have 3-5 dogs sitting on the menu, costing prep time, ingredient stock, and decision space for the customer.
Cut the dogs. Watch what happens.
This is Pillar 1 of the Freedom System. We’ll go deeper in coming weeks.