INDUSTRY KNOW-HOW
Four Steps To Find Your Most Profitable Products
Your POS system contains the data that can help identify what drives profit, not just sales.
Why it matters: Many operators know their best-selling products but lack visibility into which items generate the strongest margins. Here are four steps to generate a POS report that can help you make smarter pricing decisions.
Step 1: Find the Report
Log into your POS back office and look for Product Mix, Item Sales or Menu Analysis. Every brand names it differently, but they generate a line-by-line list of what sold, how many times and how much it brought in. Set the range to the last thirty or ninety days to get a better look at performance.
Step 2: Read the Two Numbers That Matter
- Units sold: This is your volume of products moving off the shelf or out of the well.
- Profit per item: This shows what is left after what you paid for the product.
Sort by profit and hold it up against volume.
Step 3: Sort Everything Into Four Groups
With both numbers in front of you, every item lands in one of four groups.
- High volume, high profit: Your star items. Feature them, protect them and never run out.
- High volume, low profit: Popular products, but thin. A small price bump or a cheaper supplier usually fixes it.
- Low volume, high profit: Quiet earners worth a better spot on the menu or a shelf at eye level, which is where shoppers look first and buy most.
- Low volume, low profit: Cut these products and give the space to something that pulls its own weight.
Step 4: Put it to Work
Menu engineering, a practice built on this exact data, is credited to lifting restaurant profits. Reprice one thin bestseller, move one quiet earner to eye level and drop one item that is performing poorly. Run the report again next month and see what moved.
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