The Small Business Menu Engineering Lab

 Create an interactive menu analysis tool for cafés, restaurants, food trucks, and small food businesses.

Allow users to enter menu items, selling prices, ingredient costs, packaging costs, preparation time, sales quantities, and optional wastage estimates.

Build:

• A contribution-margin calculator for each item.

• A popularity-versus-profitability matrix.

• A preparation workload analysis showing which items consume the most service time.

• A recipe cost editor with ingredient-level quantities and unit conversions.

• A price-change simulator showing how margins change under different scenarios.

• A bundle builder that calculates combined costs and margins.

• A menu simplification planner identifying overlapping ingredients and operational complexity.

• A report ranking possible changes by expected impact and implementation effort.

Do not equate high sales volume with high profit. Keep ingredient costs, packaging, labor assumptions, and wastage transparent. Do not invent sales data or assume that a price increase will preserve demand. Include a fictional café dataset, editable recipes, and exportable costing sheets.