Menu re-engineering across 60 quick-service locations, +6 points gross margin.
A 60-store QSR chain was pricing every item the same way. Its margin structure had drifted quietly for three years.
Points gross-margin uplift
Change in headline menu prices
Same-store traffic post-rollout
The Challenge
Same-store sales were flat and food inflation was running at 9%. The obvious move — a 5% menu-wide price increase — had been tried the year before and moved traffic 8% down.
Nobody had looked at profitability by item, only by category. Half the top-ten sellers were the lowest-margin items in the store.
Our Approach
We rebuilt item-level economics from POS and recipe data across 60 stores, then overlaid a menu-engineering matrix — stars, plough-horses, puzzles, dogs — customer by customer.
The redesign wasn't a price change; it was a placement change. Six low-margin heroes moved off the top of the menu, three new bundles were built around high-margin components, and one entire underperforming category was retired.
We field-tested the new menu in six stores against six controls for four weeks before national rollout. Uplift in the test stores was consistent and statistically significant.
The Outcome
The engagement delivered 6 on points gross-margin uplift, 0% on change in headline menu prices, and +4% on same-store traffic post-rollout — measurable, defensible, and owned by the client team on day one after handover.
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