What could MenuZ mean for your restaurant?

Value

The economics come down to your menu.

MenuZ can create value in several places: less food purchased through personalised portions, better use of surplus stock, and opportunities to increase the value of an order.

The saving lives almost entirely in the protein line, and a gram of ribeye is worth eighteen times a gram of chicken. A 40 seat grill doing 2,000 covers a month, with a third of guests answering the questions, buys about AED 7,200 less beef a month against a base fee of AED 1,836. The same restaurant selling burgers and chicken saves AED 1,291, which clears the fee and little else.

Your numbers

Put your restaurant in.

Change anything below. The portions and supplier prices are prefilled from the research further down, so if you only know your covers you can start there.

Step one

What comes off each dish.

Two thousand guests of real, varied bodies, run through the same code your guests will use.

A ribeye and a chicken breast lose about the same shareof their weight. One is worth eighteen times the other, because you pay AED 110 a kilo for one and AED 15 for the other. That is the whole story.

A burger is not on this table on purpose. A patty is a weak protein source, so the solver keeps it near its menu weight and the saving is close to nothing unless you switch on never serve above the standard portion. Put your own dishes in the calculator and it will tell you the same thing. A check holds every figure here against the live solver on every build.

Step two

Your prices, not ours.

The saving is grams multiplied by what you pay your supplier, so the only price that matters is yours. The calculator starts on public Dubai figures and you overwrite them. The grade is the biggest lever on this page: Angus rather than grass fed roughly triples the saving.

Step three

How many guests will want it.

The closest published figure to what MenuZ does is a good one. Nearly six in ten diners say they are more likely to visit a restaurant where the portion can fit them, and that rises to about three in four among guests eating less than they used to. Half were surprised by how large a restaurant plate was. Three in ten wished it had been smaller.

Read the second half of that again. The guests ordering least are the ones most likely to choose you for this, which is the opposite of how a smaller portion usually feels on a forecast.

And the appetite is growing rather than steady. The share of adults actively working to hit their protein target went from 59% in 2022 to 71% in 2025. Closer to home, 76% of UAE adults want to know the nutritional make-up of what they order. They already want this. Today they have to interrogate your menu to get it.

The planning figures on this page are 35% of covers when your staff mention it and 20% when they do not. Move the slider in the calculator to your own view.

Portions and plate size: ReFED with Datassential, August 2025, 1,509 US adults, nationally representative. Protein: International Food Information Council Food and Health Survey 2025, 3,000 US adults, with the 2022 and 2023 waves for the series. Nutrition information: Alblooshi and colleagues, PLOS ONE 2023, 1,279 UAE adults.

Step four

What you may charge for it.

You decide. Personalisation can be part of the experience you already sell, or it can carry your own fee like any other add-on. The calculator starts at AED 10 and keeps whatever you set on its own line, because a cost you stop paying and a price you start charging are different kinds of money.

Analysis

Model assumptions.

• How many dishes a guest orders. No publisher gives an average item count per check for full service restaurants, only check value. This page assumes one main a cover, which is the floor.
• How often a restaurant runs out. No survey exists, so the stock push line is a share you set yourself rather than a measured figure.
• UAE trade price lists. All behind a login. Bulk butcher prices are the nearest defensible stand-in.
• Food cost by dish category. The 35 to 50% on steak against 20 to 33% on pasta is a trade rule of thumb, not a measurement.
• That every gram saved was waste. It was not. Most of it was going to be eaten by somebody who did not need it. What the page claims is that every gram was bought.

Sources

Where every number came from.

Portion weights.Taken from the weights Dubai restaurants publish on their own menus, which is what set 300g rather than 250g as the steak the model solves.

Prices. MLS UAE whole cuts; Gulf News Dubai market survey; Selina Wamucii UAE salmon; USDA AMS boxed beef cuts and FRED for the United States; Foodomarket for the United Kingdom.

Food cost and menu engineering. TouchBistro, Lightspeed, Toast, Square and meez on food cost percentage and contribution margin. Category splits are operator grade rather than primary, and are labelled as such.

Take-up. Toast QR code menu insights, 850 US adults; Statista on QR menu use; Uniqode across 950 restaurants; Paytronix on loyalty enrolment.

Waste. WRAP on the hospitality and food service sector, 1.1 million tonnes a year, 21% spoilage and 34% plate waste, and its 2022 out-of-home survey finding 15% of the main course left and 48% of diners blaming portion size. Champions 12.3 across 114 restaurants. Beef Checkoff on shelf life.

Portions and protein. Robinson and colleagues in the BMJ, 2018; Young and Nestle, 2002 and 2003; Schoenfeld and Aragon, 2018; Morton and colleagues, 2018; Berkowitz and colleagues, 2016.