Your menu is a P&L. It just doesn't read like one yet.
A Cornell study found that restaurants running menu engineering properly added roughly 10% to profit without changing a single recipe. Against a 3% net margin — where most operators sit — that is close to tripling profit, with no new spend.
Upload a 90-day sales-mix export from your POS. We cost every dish, plot it against how often it sells, and hand you a ranked list of no more than five moves — reprice, reposition, replace, remove — each with a dollar estimate per year.
If your POS can export a sales report, you can have this by tomorrow. First report free.
Dish, units sold, contribution margin per plate, quadrant. That is the whole idea.
Reprice the house burger from $19 to $21. It is still the cheapest entrée on the menu.
Three steps, no implementation project
Export
Pull the menu-item sales report from your POS for the last 90 days. Toast, Square for Restaurants, Lightspeed, Aloha, Lavu and Clover all export it natively. See the exact export path for your system.
Upload
One CSV or Excel file: dish name, units sold, sales total, food cost where you have it. Where your POS lacks per-item food cost, you fill a one-page cost sheet for your top 20 items — four to eight hours of work, not a three-month implementation.
Get the moves
Within two working days you get every dish costed and plotted on the popularity-versus-margin matrix, a ranked list of at most five moves with annual dollar estimates, and where each dish should sit on the physical menu. The full method.
If your POS can export a sales report, you can have this by tomorrow.
Existing menu-engineering tools run $49 to $200+ per location per month, and their shared weakness is onboarding: full inventory integration, recipe databases, invoice ingestion — before they produce anything. An independent operator with one location and no back-office staff never finishes that setup.
Optimal works from a single POS export, on day one, with no inventory system. Your first report is free, because the report itself proves the value.
Three things Optimal is not
It does one job: it tells you which dishes earn their place on the menu, which don't, and what each fix is worth in dollars.
The margin math every operator already knows
You cannot renegotiate rent mid-lease and you cannot cut the line below service standard. The menu is the one lever you fully control — what goes on it, what it costs, where it sits. In 2025, 45% of operators were not profitable. The ones who are tend to run food cost closer to 34.2% labor discipline and an engineered menu, not a hopeful one.
One export, from the system you already run
The exact export path for each system, written step by step.
First report free. Then $39 per location per month.
The first report
The full deliverable for one location: matrix, five moves, menu layout, dollar estimates. It is the entire sales pitch, so it costs nothing.
Quarterly + weekly
Quarterly menu-engineering report, weekly prime-cost tracking, and tracking of the lift after each menu change. Monthly billing, cancel any time.
Single report
One full report, no subscription. For operators who want the analysis once a season and nothing else.
Send us 90 days of sales. We send back the moves.
We email your report within two working days. One file is all it takes — the menu-item sales export from your POS.