SALES DATA · PRINT-READY · ONE-TIME PROJECT
A menu redesign that starts with what's actually selling.
Not a font-and-layout refresh. Your own point-of-sale data, classified into what's making money and what isn't, then rebuilt against the same behavioral standard as everything else CORXIT touches.
THE METHOD
Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, Dogs.
Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith, Michigan State University, 1982 — the original, peer-reviewed menu engineering model. Every item on your menu gets plotted on two axes: how often it sells, and how much it actually makes you.
Stars
Popular and profitable. Protected, given the best visual real estate on the page.
Plowhorses
Popular, thin margin. Same position, quietly nudged on price or cost.
Puzzles
Profitable, but nobody orders them. Rewritten and repositioned to get noticed.
Dogs
Neither popular nor profitable. Cut, or reworked entirely.
THE PROCESS
Who, what, when, where, why, how.
Who — Your Data
Ninety days of your own sales-mix data: what sold, how often, at what price.
What — The Classification
Every item sorted into Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, or Dogs — the objective read, before any design happens.
Where — Visual Hierarchy
Stars get the dominant visual weight and the highest-attention positions on the page. Puzzles move into those same zones to get discovered.
Why — The Language
Every description rewritten outcome-forward — what the dish actually delivers, not just what's in it.
How — The Handoff
A full, print-ready spec, handed to your printer directly. We never touch the physical production.
When — The Read
Twelve weeks post-launch, results are checked against the day-one baseline: average check, item velocity, table turns.
Questions, answered plainly.
Best run once there's traffic to measure against.
Menu Engineering works from real sales data — the more established the traffic, the sharper the read. If you're earlier in building foot traffic, a CORXIT Digital evaluation or CORXIT Build often makes more sense first.
START WITH YOUR MENU →