Restaurants & Food · Scenario 01

Sushi Restaurant

A respected neighbourhood sushi counter, packed on weekends — yet the owner can’t say which dishes actually make money. We rebuild the menu around contribution margin and how far each price can really stretch.

Method · Price elasticity modelling

The situation

The counter seats 14 and turns away walk-ins on Friday nights, so the owner assumes the business is healthy. But prices were set years ago by copying nearby restaurants and rounding to a comfortable number. Omakase — the most labour-intensive, highest-skill offering — is underpriced out of modesty, while high-volume rolls carry prices the market quietly resists.

No one has ever tied a single plate back to its true ingredient and labour cost, so the menu is a blend of quiet winners and silent losers. ‘Busy’ and ‘profitable’ have drifted apart — and nobody can say by how much.

seats at the counter

menu items, never costed

~240

covers per week

Gut feel

how prices were set

Where we dig for the truth

Before touching a single price we reconstruct the unit economics of every dish and watch how demand has actually reacted whenever prices moved.

POS line items (12 months)Ingredient & portion costsSupplier invoicesReservation & walk-in logCompetitor menu pricingWeekday vs. weekend mix

Omakase demand is inelastic up to about $88 — a 12% price rise costs almost no covers but adds margin to every seat.

Our approach — Price-Elasticity & Margin-Mix Optimization

We estimate a demand curve for each major item from the price points already present in a year of sales, then layer in true contribution margin (price minus ingredient and direct labour). Every dish lands in one of four quadrants: high-margin winners to protect, underpriced gems to lift, low-margin volume to re-engineer, and dead weight to cut.

The new menu is not ‘everything more expensive’. It is a solved mix — raise the inelastic, high-skill items, sharpen a couple of hero rolls to keep driving traffic, and redesign or retire the plates that lose money on every order.

Most of the gain comes from the omakase and sake lines — high skill, high willingness to pay, historically underpriced.

What changes

Same kitchen, same seats, same hours — a different menu mix. The figures below are a representative outcome for a counter of this size.

Why this is not "social media management"

Nothing here depends on a new logo, more posts, or ad spend. The profit was already walking through the door — it was leaking out through prices set by habit. We found it with a year of receipts and a demand model, not a content calendar. That is the difference between marketing theatre and marketing that survives contact with your P&L.

Frequently asked questions

How can data improve a sushi restaurant's profit?

By costing every dish and estimating how demand responds to price, we rebuild the menu around contribution margin — raising under-priced, high-skill items like omakase and cutting plates that lose money. In a representative case this lifted monthly profit by roughly 60% with no extra covers.

What is menu price-elasticity modelling?

It is a statistical estimate of how the number of orders changes when a price changes. Items whose demand barely moves with price (inelastic) can carry a higher price for pure margin; price-sensitive items are handled differently. We fit these curves from a year of POS data.

Isn't this just social media or website work?

No. There is no rebrand, ad spend or content calendar. We work from the restaurant's own sales data and a demand model to fix pricing and menu mix — the gritty analytics most agencies never touch. Book a marketing audit.

Want this run on your numbers?

Send us a year of POS data and we’ll show you which plates are quietly funding the rest.