Fall Menu Planning: How to Use Sales Data to Decide What Stays

Every time a new season rolls around, the same conversation happens in kitchens everywhere: what should we keep, what goes, and what new dish should make its debut? Too often, that conversation gets settled by gut feeling, or simply "we've always done it this way." You’re probably thinking, there’s gotta be a better way of doing this. And if your till has been logging every order all year, then you actually already have all the answers. The question is knowing where to look and what to do from there. 

Planning a great fall menu takes more than sprinkling pumpkin spice on everything and hoping for the best. Ready to actually get this right? Let us show you.

It takes more than just gut feeling

You might be inclined to just plonk your bestsellers or most-complimented dish on the menu as usual, but doing so overlooks vast amounts of data you could use to your advantage. Otherwise, you might be keeping a dish around that's quietly costing you more than it's earning. So, why not double-check the numbers to make sure you’re on track to maximum menu success? 

This process is called menu engineering. All it really means is looking at your sales data and your food costs together, rather than one without the other.

Instead of asking "do we like this dish," you ask two more useful questions: how often is it actually selling, and how much is it actually making you? Fortunately, there’s a system that can help answer this question for you. 

The two categories that matter for menu planning

It all comes down to two categories, and these are the things that matter most. Every dish on your menu can be judged against two things:

• Popularity: How often it sells relative to everything else on the menu.

• Profitability: How much margin it leaves once ingredient costs are accounted for.

Using these two categories, every dish on your menu falls into one of four rough camps:

• Popular and profitable: These are your stars. These are the dishes to keep front and centre on the fallmenu, and the ones worth building seasonal specials around.

• Popular but low-margin: These dishes are pulling people in, but not making you much once costs are factored in. Worth a closer look at pricing or portion size before you decide whether to keep, adjust, or retire them altogether.

• Profitable but rarely ordered: These are hidden gems that might just need better placement, a new description, or a mention from staff to get noticed.

• Neither popular nor profitable: The ones you can usually cut without anyone noticing, freeing up kitchen capacity and menu space for something that'll actually earn it.

Portion sizes and ingredient costs both feed into that profitability number, and popularity isn't fixed either; a small tweak to placement or description can shift it. Everything matters when you're planning your menu, and for best results, every single factor is worth considering, especially if you have limited menu capacity. Sometimes you'll have to be ruthless, cutting a dish you personally love because the numbers just don't back it up, but you know how it goes: the numbers don't lie.

What to actually pull from your reports before you plan

Before you sit down to redesign your fall menu, some reports are worth pulling from your POS system. With this information to hand, you’ll be better equipped to make a smart business decision for your restaurant. Here’s what you’ll need to look at:

• Sales by item, over the last three to six months: What's actually selling, and how does that compare to a year ago, if you have last fall's data to check against?

• Sales by time of day or day of week: A dish that dies at lunch but sells well in the evening might just need repositioning rather than cutting entirely.

• Profit margin per dish: If your system tracks ingredient costs against sales, this is where a "popular" dish can quietly turn out to be barely breaking even.

• Wastage or 86'd item reports: Frequently running out of an item is often as strong a signal of demand as the sales figures themselves.

• Customer or location-based reports: If you operate more than one site, a dish that's thriving at one location might be dead weight at another, and a single fallmenu might not fit every site equally well.

Most modern POS systems, including Epos Now, generate these as standard reports rather than something you need a separate tool to calculate: sales, inventory, and profit-and-loss reports are all available directly from the back office, filterable by item, location, staff member, or time period.

Turning data into menu items

So you've got the numbers in front of you, so what next? It's tempting to jump straight to designing exciting new seasonal specials, but here's what we recommend: start with what to cut, not just what to add. Trimming underperforming dishes frees up kitchen capacity, ingredient budget, and menu space. If you're not sure about a dish, consider whether you can reposition it first: a genuinely bad sales figure might just mean it's badly placed or badly described on the menu, so try moving it, renaming it, or pairing it with a seasonal twist before you retire it for good.

When it comes to new additions, let seasonal ingredients guide you, but check the previous year's data for anything similar before committing to it. When pricing, think in terms of margin rather than just what feels fair: a dish with popular ingredients but thin margins might need a small price adjustment rather than being pulled altogether, especially during a season where ingredient costs may be shifting.

Once the new menu is live, don't treat the decision as final; feel free to revisit it in a few weeks. The real test of any menu change is what the data shows once it's actually out there, and there's no shame in chopping and changing throughout the season if that's what the numbers tell you to do.

Your till already has the answer

The good news is that all of this information can be made available to you with ease. While this sounds like a tricky thing to figure out by hand – checking receipts, cross-referencing spreadsheets, guessing at margins, trying to remember what sold well last spring – it is exactly the kind of manual work a POS system is meant to replace.

Epos Now's reporting tools give you sales, inventory, and profit-and-loss reports directly from the back office, filterable by item, location, staff member, or time period, so you can see how every single dish is actually performing without having to build the analysis yourself. 

If you're managing more than one site, location-based reporting shows you whether a dish is working everywhere or only really earning its place at one venue. If you want a fuller walkthrough of how this looks in practice, our guide to using Epos Now reports for a seasonal menu covers the same approach for the Christmas rush, and the same reports apply just as well heading into any other season.

These systems exist to make your life easier without requiring separate tools or added costs bolted onto your till. It's the same system already ringing up every order, just put to work answering the question you're asking each time a new season comes around: what's actually worth keeping on the menu. This fall, you’ll be able to answer this question confidently, without the guesswork, second-guessing, or memory games of seasons past.