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Step-by-Step Menu Engineering for Restaurant Delivery with FREE Downloadable Worksheet

Your delivery menu should be a leaner, more efficient version of your in-house menu. By focusing on "Stars" that travel perfectly and "Puzzles" that can be easily upsold, you ensure that every delivery driver leaving your kitchen is carrying a profitable order. Remember, the goal of menu engineering isn't just to list what you cook—it's to guide your customers toward the dishes that are best for both your brand and your bank account

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Menu engineering is a proven practice of analyzing and strategically designing a restaurant menu to maximize profits.

Strategically designing your menu for pick-up and delivery can be a bit more challenging. With the traditional method focusing on quantifiable profitability and popularity metrics, menu engineering for restaurant delivery takes other factors into consideration: feasibility and practicality.

To help you get started, we’ve created a Delivery Menu Engineering Worksheet along with this guide to menu engineering for restaurant delivery basics to help you get started.





With food costs, supply shortages, and other outside influences impacting the way the food game is played these days, it’s critical to make menu engineering an ongoing and continuous business strategy. Evaluating–and re-evaluating–the performance of items on your online menu on a regular basis is a best practice for restaurant delivery.

First, let’s examine what menu engineering for restaurant delivery is and how to use it in your online menu design for maximum profitability.

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Menu Engineering for Restaurant Delivery Step-by-Step

STEP 1: SELECT A TIME PERIOD


The first step in creating a Delivery Engineering Worksheet is to select the timeframe to analyze. You can analyze your menu weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually — and even all of the above.

Updating your menu four times a year will help to give you a clear sense of how your menu items are affecting costs and sales.

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STEP 2: INPUT YOUR DATA INTO THE WORKSHEET

After choosing a time period, the next thing you’ll need to do is record the items on your menu. If you just want to optimize your delivery menu, only list those.

  1. Fill in Column A with all of the menu items from your pick-up and delivery menu

  2. Fill in Column B with the amount sold via delivery. Do not include in-house sales.

  3. Fill in Column C with food costs

  4. Insert Menu Price in Column D

Step 3: CALCULATE DATA

Column E: Food Cost Percentage

Column F: Contribution Margin

Column G: Total Food Cost

Column H: Total Menu Sales Formula

Column I: Total Contribution Margin

Column J: Profit Category

Column K: Popularity Category

Column L: Item Category

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Item Categories

The menu engineering graph in the menu engineering template organizes your menu items into Stars, Puzzles, Workhorses, and Dogs, four words that can be used to design your online menu and analyze which items should stay, go or be adjusted.




  1. Star = high popularity + high popularity

  2. Puzzles = high profit / low popularity

  3. Dogs = low popularity/ low profitability

  4. Workhorse = low profitability / high popularity

Star items should be included on your online menu. Items with “dog” status should be eliminated (at least until conditions change).

If included in your menu, workhorses and puzzles should be highlighted in a way that attracts attention to their best features, and away from their least. For example, if an item is pricey but popular, make photos more prominent than the price. If an item is meant to act as a plowhorse, feature them close to your stars.

Upsell your challenges by including them in pop-ups that appear during the checkout process. Example: “Don’t forget dessert! Try our tiramisu.”

STEP 4: EVALUATE FOR DELIVERY

There are quite a few factors that might not have been considered when you designed your original menu, so it’s critical to reconsider which items are feasible and practical. These factors, though not necessarily quantifiable, are considered based on which items travel well and which item ingredients are available.

If an item falls into the STAR category, for example, but supply chain shortages are making the ingredients difficult to obtain, or if seasonal factors make certain items not deliverable (summer/ice cream, for example) that might send that menu item into the delivery doghouse.

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Related Resources





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By Eileen Strauss



Frequently Asked Questions

Traditional menu engineering is the strategic design of a menu to maximize profitability based on popularity and profit margins. For delivery, it adds a layer of feasibility and practicality. You must consider how well a dish travels and the reliability of your ingredient supply chain.

  • Stars: High popularity and high profitability. These are your anchors—keep them prominent.

  • Workhorses: High popularity but lower profitability. These bring people in; keep them near your Stars to balance costs.

  • Step 1: Choose a Timeframe. Analyze your data monthly or quarterly (four times a year) to account for seasonal shifts and changing food costs.

  • Step 2: Record Specific Delivery Data. Only use sales numbers from pick-up and delivery. Do not mix in-house dining data, as customer behavior differs between the two.

  • Step 3: Calculate the Margins. Determine the food cost percentage and the “Contribution Margin” (Price minus Food Cost) for each item.

  • Step 4: Evaluate for Travel. Even a “Star” item should be cut if it doesn’t travel well (e.g., ice cream in a hot climate) or if supply chain issues make ingredients hard to get

  • Highlight Puzzles: If a high-profit item isn’t selling, use a more prominent photo or feature it in a checkout pop-up (e.g., “Don’t forget dessert! Try our tiramisu.”).

  • Frame the Price: For popular but pricey items, focus on the visual appeal. Make the food photography more striking than the price tag to emphasize value.

  • Upsell: Include high-margin items as add-ons for popular “Workhorse” dishes to increase the total order profit.

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