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Our menu doesn’t sell the high-margin dishes

The schnitzel sells, and so does the food cost. The dishes the house earns on are rarely ordered, and nobody knows exactly which they are.

Typical for: half-board hotels with choice menus · à-la-carte restaurants inside hotels · kitchens where the chef writes the menu and the owner sets the prices

Documented by Hospis

Updated: 23 October 2026

How you recognize it

  • We know the food cost of at most half the dishes
  • Sales per dish aren’t pulled from the POS regularly
  • The menu has more than 25 items and rarely changes
  • Prices were last raised across the board by a percentage
  • There is no dish the team actively recommends because it is good for the house
  • Food cost fluctuates month to month without anyone knowing why

Matching Hospi

VW

Valentin Walch

MAJOVA · F&B · Wine · Menu Architecture, Lech am Arlberg
Works with protel · Mews · Mews POS · Smart Host
AdviseImplement

Builds menus from the costing up: recipe, margin, order and recommendation as one system carried by kitchen and service together.

Mapped to root cause
Costing is missing or outdatedPopularity and margin aren’t looked at togetherService doesn’t know what to recommend
View profilePersonally vetted · independent match

Software that solved this problem

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POSPartnerExample

Beispiel Kassensystem

Implementation Hospi: Head of customer success

One POS for restaurant, bar and spa that talks to the PMS and makes margin visible.

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Which path fits your situation?

01

Diagnosis

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Urgent support

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Cause fields and how to tell them apart

A menu that sells the wrong dishes is rarely a matter of taste. It is the result of missing costing, missing order and a service team that doesn’t know what to recommend.

These fields are complete, and many properties get there on their own. That is what this page is for. The cost simply does not appear on an invoice: internal hours, a few attempts, and a season that keeps running in the meantime.

01

Costing is missing or outdated

How you spot it

Recipes live in the chef’s head, purchase prices have changed several times since the last costing. The selling price comes from comparing with the neighbour, not from your own numbers.

The way out

Cost every dish properly once: recipe, portion, current purchase price. That is a few days of manual work, and afterwards you know for the first time where the money is.

02

Popularity and margin aren’t looked at together

How you spot it

The bestseller with weak margin stays because it sells. The dish with good margin gets cut because it rarely moves. Both decisions feel right and are wrong.

The way out

Put sales count and contribution per dish into one matrix: build the stars, make the puzzles visible, recost the plough-horses, drop the dogs. That is menu engineering, and it only needs POS data and costing.

03

The menu has no dramaturgy

How you spot it

Twenty dishes in the same font, same size, prices in a column on the right. The guest’s eye looks for the familiar classic and the cheapest price, and finds both first.

The way out

Fewer items, a clear order, the stars where the eye lands first. Descriptions that create appetite, prices without a column. The menu leads, it doesn’t list.

04

Service doesn’t know what to recommend

How you spot it

“What do you recommend?” gets a personal preference or whatever is overstocked. Nobody told the team which three dishes carry the house.

The way out

Two or three recommendations per service that help margin and kitchen at once, briefly explained in the pre-shift briefing. Service is happy to sell what it understands.

Frequently asked

Do we have to raise prices for this?
Not across the board. Usually it is enough to reprice a few dishes and reposition others. Costing shows where an increase is needed and where it costs guests. In Germany, food in restaurants has been taxed at a permanent 7 percent since 1 January 2026, while drinks stay at 19 percent. At the same gross price, more remains net per dish. Whether and how much of this is passed on to guests is each house's own decision. That is why it pays to recalculate contribution margins now. An analysis of around 180,000 dishes in more than 12,000 restaurants, commissioned by the NGG union, found that between October 2025 and February/March 2026, 91 percent of prices stayed unchanged and prices rose by 0.5 percent on average. DEHOGA points out that 73.4 percent of businesses held their prices stable despite higher costs. So check where you have room dish by dish, instead of raising or cutting across the board.
Does menu engineering fit a half-board hotel?
Especially there. With a choice menu, the order of dishes decides the evening’s food cost, without the guest noticing.
How often should we rework the menu?
Look at the numbers monthly, adjust the menu each season. Big overhauls are rarely needed if you make small ones regularly.

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Our menu doesn’t sell the high-margin dishes

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