Industry: Foodservice
Products: Checkout Buyer Analytics, Analytic Reporting for POS Store Level Data

Business Challenge

Deciding whether or not to drop an item from a menu is like deciding to take a player out of the lineup. Morale may suffer and fans might get angry, sometimes expressing their rage on social media. It’s a decision that can’t be taken lightly.

A foodservice operator was considering doing just that, but wanted to exercise caution. This NPD client needed to know if nixing the product would alienate a large segment of buyers. Our Checkout team was tasked with finding out.

What We Found

It turns out the menu item in question was one of our client’s least popular items, with only 5 percent of customers purchasing the item at least once—as shown by Checkout’s Menu Optimization analysis. Only 2 percent were incremental buyers of the product, spending more than half of their wallet on that item. In short, a vast majority of our client’s customers would be unaffected if the menu item vanished. 


A vast majority of our client’s customers would be unaffected if Item X vanished. Item X was the primary sales driver for only 2 percent of their customers. 

Outcome

We presented these findings to our client’s senior leadership team and the Checkout data helped them decide to remove the product from its menu in all geographic areas except those where Item X was especially popular.


Checkout helped this operator make the call to remove a menu item that wouldn’t be missed by many customers.