Built for bartenders and menu builders — the natural next step after pricing individual drinks with the Batch & Costing Calculator. Add every drink on the list with its cost per serving, its menu price if you've already set one (leave it blank to auto-price at your target pour cost), its spirit family, and — if you track it — how many you actually sold. It's a working guideline from published menu-engineering method and studio field practice, not a POS or sales-reporting system.
View
Field notes
"What to do next" is generated, not a template
Every line is computed from this specific menu's own numbers — a Dog is only a Dog because its margin and sales mix are both below this menu's own averages, and a reprice suggestion is capped at a 20% increase in one step, since a bigger jump risks losing the volume that made a Plowhorse popular in the first place.
Why some prices are auto-suggested
Leave a drink's menu price blank and it's priced at your target pour cost, then rounded using whichever pricing strategy you've chosen. Clean 50¢ matches the Batch & Costing Calculator's own default; Charm and Prestige are real, published pricing-psychology conventions — not house-invented rules.
Charm vs. prestige isn't just decoration
Charm pricing (ending in .95) uses the well-documented "left-digit effect" to read as meaningfully cheaper — a fit for casual, high-volume lists. Prestige pricing (whole numbers, no cents) is the opposite move: round numbers signal confidence and quality on an upscale or fine-dining menu. Pick the one that matches the room, not just the math.
The quadrant read uses the real published formula
Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle, and Dog here follows Kasavana & Smith's original menu-engineering method: a drink counts as popular at 70% of an equal sales share or more, and "profitable" is measured against the sales-weighted average margin — not a plain average, so a high-margin drink nobody orders can't skew the baseline. It needs units sold on every single drink to mean anything, so the whole read is held back rather than guessed if any drink is missing that number.
The 40% family-balance flag is a prompt, not a rule
A menu that's mostly one spirit isn't automatically wrong — a whiskey bar should skew whiskey. The flag exists so a lean toward one family is a decision you made on purpose, not something that crept in one drink at a time.
Flavor profile works even half-tagged
Unlike the quadrant read, flavor-profile balance doesn't need every drink tagged to be useful — a gap ("nothing reads as citrus yet") is real information even from a partial picture, since it's about what's missing, not an average that a partial picture would distort.
The guest menu card hides the numbers on purpose
Cost, profit, pour cost, and the quadrant tag are internal tools for building the menu — a guest doesn't need to see them. The guest card only ever shows a drink's name, description, price, and section.