Menu engineering explained
What stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs mean, how ChowChirp computes the thresholds from your own sales mix, and how to act on each quadrant.
Menu engineering sorts every dish by two things: how often it sells and how much it earns per plate. The result is four groups, each with a different action.
The four quadrants
| Quadrant | Popularity | Margin | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | High | High | Protect them. Keep quality consistent and place them where guests look first. |
| Plowhorses | High | Low | Guests love them but they earn little. Trim cost, adjust portion, or nudge the price. |
| Puzzles | Low | High | Profitable but overlooked. Rename, reposition, or have staff recommend them. |
| Dogs | Low | Low | Consider dropping them, or keep one for a reason you can name. |
How ChowChirp draws the lines
Popularity uses your actual sales mix. The threshold is the standard 70% of an even share: withitems on the menu, a dish counts as popular if it sells more than 70% of one twentieth of total volume. Margin uses the contribution margin from the plate cost docket, with the threshold at the average margin across the row set.
Both thresholds are computed from the rows on the board, not from an industry number, so the picture changes as your menu and your prices change.
Reading the board
- Switch the channel tab to compare dine-in with delivery. A dish can be a star in the dining room and a dog on a platform after commission.
- The volume split shows how much of your sales each quadrant carries.
- The ranked table under the quadrants lists every item with its volume, margin and quadrant.
Where the numbers come from
Plate cost comes from the recipe's bill of materials at current invoice prices. Sales volume comes from closed orders where ChowChirp captured the sale, or from an external POS mapped through POS › Mapping. Dishes with no recipe show as uncosted and sit outside the quadrants until they are mapped.
What it is not
A quadrant is a prompt, not an instruction. A dog might be the dish a regular comes for. A plowhorse might be the reason your lunch trade exists. The board tells you where to look; you decide.
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Updated 2026-09-16