Recipes & menu engineering
Build recipes from your inventory, watch plate cost compute live, and let the engineering matrix show which dishes earn their place.
Updated 3 August 2026
What it is
Recipes connect every dish to the ingredients it is made from, so plate cost and margin are computed rather than guessed. Menu engineering then plots every item on a popularity-versus-margin matrix and recommends what to do about each one.
What problem it solves
Most venues can name their best-selling dish but not their most profitable one — and the two are rarely the same. Without plate costs, pricing is folklore. With them, the menu becomes a portfolio you can actually manage: promote the winners, fix the pretenders, retire the passengers.
How it works
-
Build a recipe for each dish from your inventory ingredients. Every line costs itself from the ingredient's average cost, and the plate cost, margin and cost ratio recompute live as you edit — before you even save.
-
Because ingredient costs come from inventory, plate costs stay honest as supplier prices move — no annual costing spreadsheet slowly drifting from reality.
-
Run the menu engineering snapshot. Every item is classified by popularity and margin into the four classic quadrants: Stars (popular and profitable), Plough horses (popular, thin margin), Puzzles (profitable, unpopular) and Dogs (neither).
-
Each item comes with a recommended action — and you can overrule it with a manual note where you know something the numbers do not, like a dish that brings people through the door.
-
Review the supporting views: quadrant distribution, revenue mix by quadrant, category breakdown and top performers. Export the lot to CSV when you want it in a spreadsheet.
Everything inside the system
- Recipe builder with per-line ingredient costing from live inventory costs.
- Live plate cost, margin and cost-ratio calculation in the editor.
- Menu engineering matrix: Stars, Plough horses, Puzzles, Dogs.
- Automated recommended actions with manual overrides and notes.
- Quadrant distribution, revenue mix, category breakdown, top performers, CSV export.
This is built into NexDine — there is no separate costing spreadsheet or engineering tool to buy. Recipes read the same inventory your purchasing runs on, and the matrix reads the same sales your orders produce.