1. Cost-plus (the floor)
Plate cost ÷ target food cost %. The only strategy that mathematically cannot price below cost — provided the plate cost is honest.
Use it for: Every dish, first. The others adjust from here.
2. Competitor anchoring
Positioning against what nearby menus charge for comparable dishes. Tells you what the market tolerates; says nothing about your costs.
Use it for: Choosing where in your cost-plus range to land — never for going below its bottom.
3. Psychological pricing
Charm endings, removing currency signs, price placement on the page. Small, real, well-documented effects.
Use it for: The last 50 cents, after the floor and the positioning are settled.
4. Menu engineering
Margin-vs-popularity classification across the whole menu — stars, plowhorses, puzzles, dogs — driving placement, promotion and re-costing.
Use it for: Deciding which dishes to fix, feature or drop once real sales data exists.
Why the order matters
Every pricing disaster we have seen described by operators has the same shape: a strategy that belongs downstream was applied first. Matching a competitor before computing cost imports their supplier terms into your menu. Charm-pricing a dish down to $9.95 from a $10.40 floor gives away the margin the floor existed to protect. Cost first — computed from pack prices and yields with the food cost calculator — then the market, then the psychology, then the engineering with the matrix.
The maintenance problem nobody prices in
A pricing strategy is a snapshot; supplier prices are a stream. The menu priced perfectly in March is mispriced by August through no decision of yours — butter moved, chicken moved, the sack of flour moved. The strategies above only stay applied if plate costs stay current, which in practice means keeping ingredient prices in one place and recomputing every dish when one changes. That maintenance loop is exactly what LineCost Pro automates with its price book.
Common questions
- What is the most common menu pricing strategy?
- Cost-plus: compute the plate cost, divide by a target food cost percentage, round to a sensible price point. It is the workhorse because it is the only strategy that guarantees the floor — every other approach adjusts from it.
- Do prices ending in 9 actually work on menus?
- Charm endings ($14.95) read as value-oriented; round numbers ($15) read as quality-oriented. Both effects are real but small — they are seasoning on the price, not the price. Getting the floor and the margin right matters ten times more than the last digit.
- How often should menu prices change?
- Review whenever your input costs move — which suppliers decide, not you. Quarterly reviews are common; what matters is that a supplier price change triggers a recost at all, because silent cost creep is how a profitable menu becomes an unprofitable one with no decision ever being made.