Beneath MarketingSeason 3Episode 3
Every item you added to the menu took profit from another
In short: A long menu doesn’t sell more: top items earn over 100% of profit, the tail gives some back. The whale curve after the complexity charge; one in, one out.
A long menu doesn’t sell more. It spreads your strong items’ profit over items that haven’t earned it
Abstract
Your top ten items may earn more than 100% of your menu’s profit, while the rest give some of it back. You can’t see it because the cost of complexity (prep, waste, training, slower orders) isn’t charged to any item.
When to come back to this episode: Before adding any item, or launching a seasonal menu.
Every item came in with a sensible reason
Composite example, not a specific client
every season someone suggests a new item. A limited-time Ramadan dessert. A “trending” drink from TikTok. A kids’ meal the partner’s family asked for. Each one passes the only test we run: food cost as a percentage.
Two years later the menu has 70 items, the kitchen has nine sauces, the new cashier needs three weeks to learn the screen, and the drive-thru order takes longer. Nobody decided to slow the branch down. Each decision made sense on its own.
The hospitality tray
A host who puts twenty kinds of sweets on the tray isn’t honouring his guests more. The next day he throws half of them away, and the guests reached for the same three.
The tray people remember is the one with good dates and coffee made right, where everything on it is done well. Generosity is in the care, not the count.
The map: the whale curve
Take your menu items and work out each one’s real profit: its contribution,1 minus the cost of the complexity it causes. The simple way: prep minutes × labour cost per minute, plus waste on ingredients no other item uses. Rank the items from most to least profitable, and plot cumulative profit.
Illustrative example: a 60-item menu earning SAR 300,000 a month after the complexity charge.
- Items 1 to 12: together SAR 420,000. The curve climbs to 140% of the menu’s profit.
- Items 13 to 45: together roughly zero. The curve runs flat.
- Items 46 to 60: give back SAR 120,000. The curve falls from 140% to 100%.
The shape is a whale’s back: a steep climb, a plateau, then a fall. Your top 12 items, 20% of the menu, don’t just carry the profit. They carry the losses of the last 15 items on top of it.
ChartIllustrative example
The whale’s back: the episode’s example
Top 12 items = 20% of the menu
Source: Illustrative example from the episode; the 150–300% range is about customers, and carrying it to items is the author’s analogy. (4)
Data as a table
| Items | Profit (SAR a month) | Cumulative profit (% of total) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 12 | 420,000 | 140% |
| 13 to 45 | 0 | 140% |
| 46 to 60 | −120,000 | 100% |
One honest line: I found no published Saudi figure for menu size or item profitability. The curve is built from your own POS, not from the market.
The idea beneath the map
In 1991 Robin Cooper and Robert Kaplan wrote in Harvard Business Review about activity-based costing. The idea: much of what we call “overhead” is caused by variety itself, by batches, set-ups and the support each extra product needs. Charge those costs to the products that cause them, and you see their real profitability.2
The usual reference for the so-called “whale curve” is Kaplan and Cooper.3 In 2001 Kaplan and Narayanan described what it typically shows for customers: the most profitable 20% of customers generate between 150% and 300% of total profit, the middle majority roughly break even, and the least profitable give a large share of it back.4
Note: that finding is about customers, not menu items. Applying it to items is my analogy, and the numbers in the example are hypothetical, milder than what they found for customers. But the logic is the same: whatever is added without being charged for what it causes eats into someone else’s profit.
Earlier still, in 1982, Kasavana and Smith introduced “menu engineering”: rate every item on two measures, popularity and contribution margin, and it lands in one of four boxes: Stars, popular and profitable; Plowhorses, popular with weak margins; Puzzles, profitable but rarely ordered; and Dogs, neither ordered nor profitable.5 The tool is more than forty years old, and it’s still enough to start a Sunday morning.
Where the money leaks
A weak item doesn’t lose money on its own line. It loses in five places where its name never appears:
- Waste: ingredients for two slow items expiring in the store room.
- Peak: every extra item adds minutes at the slowest station in the kitchen, as we saw in the wedding-hall episode.6
- Training: the new cashier learns 70 items instead of 40, the subject of the last episode.7
- Ordering: a longer menu means a slower decision at the window. The Doctrine calls this “order friction”.8
- Replication: every extra item is one more thing branch 30 might do differently.9
And a second honest line: removing an item doesn’t hand back all the cost charged to it straight away. The cost disappears only when you remove what it actually consumed: the ingredient, the time on the rota, the space in the fridge. So judge the decision on the riyal that actually comes back.
SimulatorIllustrative example
Draw your menu's whale
Add items and raise the complexity charge: the cumulative-profit curve climbs above 100% and falls back like a whale’s back, and one number answers: if we dropped the bottom ten, how many riyals would we actually lose?
Result at the default values (turn on JavaScript to move the numbers).
- Curve peak
- 142.2% at item 21
- Items below zero after complexity
- 39 of 60
- If the bottom ten go (a month)
- +8,546
Stop Dropping the bottom ten adds +8,546 a month, if you actually remove what they consumed. The rule: one in, one out; any item in the Dogs box for two consecutive quarters leaves.
Rule source: A starting point your group sets in writing (Doctrine: failure mode 10)
Illustrative model, hypothetical numbers; its curve is smoother than the episode’s three-block example. Whale curve: Kaplan & Cooper; Kaplan & Narayanan’s 150–300% is about customers, not menu items. No published Saudi figure for item profitability.
Data as a table
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Menu profit after complexity (a month) | 300,000 |
| Peak | 426,708 |
| Item at the peak | 21 |
| Items below zero | 39 |
| If the bottom ten go (a month) | +8,546 |
| Rank | Cumulative profit (SAR a month) | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 152,761 | 50.9% |
| 5 | 328,429 | 109.5% |
| 10 | 394,399 | 131.5% |
| 15 | 419,282 | 139.8% |
| 20 | 426,577 | 142.2% |
| 21 | 426,708 | 142.2% |
| 25 | 424,049 | 141.3% |
| 30 | 415,240 | 138.4% |
| 35 | 402,067 | 134.0% |
| 40 | 385,683 | 128.6% |
| 45 | 366,838 | 122.3% |
| 50 | 346,046 | 115.3% |
| 55 | 323,676 | 107.9% |
| 60 | 300,000 | 100.0% |
How it’s calculated
- Item i sells in proportion to 1 ÷ i^a; total contribution before complexity is fixed, so adding an item spreads it thinner
- Item profit = its contribution − the complexity charge; the curve is the running total in rank order
- If the bottom ten go = Σ (complexity that comes back − item contribution) over the last ten
- Verdict: the menu loses if the total ≤ 0; otherwise drop if the number is positive, keep if negative
The Sunday-morning question
One question, one metric, one rule
| Question | “If we dropped the bottom ten items in the ranking… how many riyals would we actually lose?” |
|---|---|
| Metric | Cumulative item-profit curve after the complexity charge (prep minutes, dedicated ingredients, waste) |
| Decision rule | A starting point your group sets in writing:10 one item in, one item out. Any item that stays in the Dogs box for two consecutive quarters leaves the menu in every branch. |
This week
- Export 90 days of item sales and margins from the POS for three branches.
- Place every item in one of Kasavana and Smith’s four boxes, and count the Dogs.
- Pick an ingredient used by only one or two items, and work out how much of it you wasted last month.
The tray people remember
Seasonal items aren’t your enemy, and experiments aren’t banned. The rule is that every item is tested and pays for its place, like any branch.
Credit where it’s due: Kaplan and Cooper drew the whale, Kasavana and Smith drew the four boxes, and the tray comes from our majlis.
But who decides to add the item in the first place? Often a manager paid on sales, not on profit. That’s the next episode: “You pay your branch manager for sales and hope for profit.”
Sources and notes
Revenue Engineering Doctrine: contribution margin and the unit: the Doctrine manages units, not totals, and we apply the same logic here to the menu item.
Robin Cooper & Robert S. Kaplan, “Profit Priorities from Activity-Based Costing”, Harvard Business Review, May–June 1991. hbr.org/1991/05/profit-priorities-from-activity-based-costing (opens in a new tab)
Robert S. Kaplan & Robin Cooper, Cost & Effect: Using Integrated Cost Systems to Drive Profitability and Performance, Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
Robert S. Kaplan & V. G. Narayanan, “Measuring and Managing Customer Profitability”, Journal of Cost Management, September/October 2001. researchgate.net/publication/291939528_Measuring_and_managing_customer_profitability (opens in a new tab) . The 150%–300% range is about customers, not menu items; applying it to the menu is the author’s analogy.
M. L. Kasavana & D. I. Smith, Menu Engineering: A Practical Guide to Menu Analysis, 1982. See the literature review in FIU Hospitality Review: digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1453&context=hospitalityreview (opens in a new tab)
Beneath Marketing, Episode 3: The campaign worked. The branch collapsed.
Beneath Marketing, Season 3, Episode 2: Your cheapest employee is your most expensive one.
Revenue Engineering Doctrine: failure mode 10, order friction, and Principle 1, revenue is designed, not discovered.
Revenue Engineering Doctrine: measuring replication, and Episode 1 of this season.
The rule and the two-quarter limit are the author’s proposal, not a Doctrine rule or a market benchmark. For failure mode 10, the Doctrine asks you to remove one step per quarter from the highest-volume ordering flow.
Cite this
English
Alhajj, S. (2026, October 3). Every item you added to the menu took profit from another. Beneath Marketing, season 3, episode 3 (BM S3.E3). seiflden.com. https://seiflden.com/insights/menu-whale-curve/
Arabic
الحاج، سيف الدين (3 أكتوبر 2026). «كل صنف أضفته للمنيو… أخذ من ربح صنف ثاني». «تحت التسويق»، الموسم 3، الحلقة 3 (BM S3.E3). seiflden.com. https://seiflden.com/ar/insights/menu-whale-curve/