The problem with a 40-item menu

I used to run a menu with forty things on it. Six proteins, four rice options, three kinds of beans, a salsa bar with eight jars. It looked generous. It also meant every ticket took ninety seconds longer to build, and my new hires spent their first two weeks just memorizing where things went.

Last spring I cut it down to twelve items. Three burritos, two bowls, a taco plate, and sides. Revenue didn't drop. It went up eleven percent over the next quarter, mostly because the line moved faster during the noon rush and we stopped running out of stray ingredients nobody ordered anyway.

The instinct to add more feels like generosity. Customers usually read it as noise. When someone walks in hungry and sees a wall of options, they hesitate, and hesitation slows your whole line down behind them.

If you're staring down a bloated menu right now, try this: pull your last three months of sales data and look at what's actually selling. I'd bet twenty percent of your items account for most of your revenue. Cut from the bottom. Keep what people actually order, make it faster, and let the rest go.