What this install fixes
A menu cut and priced from your product mix and costed recipes, short enough for the line to run at a Friday peak.
The fee
From $7,500
Two points of food cost on $3M in food sales is $60,000 a year, before one price moves.
Discovery is $1,000, separate from the install’s price, and it scopes the install and sets that price. If it concludes an install isn’t the fix, you’ll hear it, and the $1,000 bought the read that saved you the rest.
About 30 to 60 days after discovery, with the timeframe agreed up front.
Nobody can say which items earn their place on the line, so nothing comes off the menu.
What this install fixes
The menu picks up a dish to chase a slow daypart, a guest request that became permanent and a limited-time offer that never left.
Three years on, food cost has crept two points that no single dish explains, and the kitchen misses ticket times at a full house because the line is still carrying dishes that each sell eleven times a week.
The install judges each item on what it sells, what it earns and how it runs on the line, starting in each category with the item that carries the most food-cost dollars. A dish with a strong margin that sells well can still stall the pass at a live peak, and that one gets simplified or moves to an off-peak menu.
What it looks like now
A concept is heading into new units and the menu has to travel without the founding chef.
Tell us what’s breaking.
Bring the menu and a season of product mix.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)What gets installed
What gets built
- The product mix read: a full season’s sales per hundred covers by item, category and daypart, with happy-hour and discounted items counted at their selling price.
- A plate-cost sheet for every item: its cost trued against current invoices and in-house yields, then set against the printed price as penny profit and cost percentage.
- The menu matrix: every item plotted on popularity against penny profit, and again against cost percentage, before a single dish is cut.
- Line timing: each station timed through a live peak, ticket times read station by station, and the items that stall the pass named.
- The punch list: every item marked keep, elevate, remove, back to R&D or discuss, with its margin, recipe-drift, prep and line-capacity flags beside it.
- The prep trace: every shared prep and single-use ingredient traced before a dish comes off, so a cut never leaves another plate short of its prep or strands an ingredient on the shelf.
- Recommended prices: one for each item with its margin effect, checked against the price ladder of the restaurants near each unit.
- The layout brief: section order, and in each section a price anchor and the margin items placed first.
- The POS change log: every price, addition, deactivation, description and modifier as its own row, worked by whoever runs your POS and closed before launch day.
- The rollout: a single-unit trial first, then prep lists, order guides and count sheets rewritten in every unit, and each item photographed to spec three days out.
What holds it
- The change routine: your chef and GMs put every menu change after the install through the same questions before it goes on (why change it, what the product mix says, whether it fits the brand, and what it does to prep, cost and purchasing).
- The seasonal re-read: before each new menu, the same team runs the product mix read and the menu matrix again on the latest season’s sales.
What it asks of your team: an hour a week from your GM and director of operations on the standing call, and your chef’s time in the costing and the build sessions, plus your managers’ time on live shifts through the trial and the rollout.
How it runs: discovery on site, then the standing weekly call, with live shifts reviewed by video where possible and any further time on site scoped into the price.
Start to handoff
- Discovery Pull the product mix and the costing, and flag the items that sell at a thin margin and the ones that neither sell nor earn.
- Build Cost every recipe, time the line, and re-engineer pricing, placement and prep together.
- Run Trial the shorter menu in one unit, then put it on live shifts in every unit and watch food cost and ticket times through four full weeks of product mix.
- Handoff Hand the change routine to your chef and GMs at the handoff date set in the scope; the next menu change is theirs.
If this is the problem, bring it.
Free, and before any discovery.
Book a call with Jon (opens in a new tab)What this isn’t
It does not include:
- The par, ordering, count and variance system (that’s the Food-Cost Install)
- New concept or brand work (that’s Concept Ideation & Brand Identity)
- A full R&D program, seasonal calendar or beverage program rebuild (that’s the full Menu Strategy & R&D capability)
- Menu design and print production (we hand the designer the engineered layout; the design is theirs)
- Vendor renegotiation
Common questions
What does the Menu Engineering Install cost?
How is this different from the Food-Cost Install?
What stops the menu from growing back?
Who runs it
RANGE was founded by Jon Peck, who spent twenty years running multi-unit restaurant groups: eight brands built and scaled, twelve openings across six concepts in three years, and more than $100 million of annual P&L owned.