Find out what sells, and what nobody orders

The Products card counts lines on accepted orders in the period, so it is what customers chose and paid for rather than what they clicked on and thought better of.

Not ordered in this period

The second half of the card is the more useful one, and the one nobody looks at.

It lists everything on your menu that no accepted order in the period asked for. Three things are deliberately left out:

• Draft products, because they were never offered.
• Delivery fees and space fees, which are money but not dishes.
• Staff lines, for the same reason.

Without those exclusions the list would be padded with things that were never meant to be ordered on their own, and you would stop reading it.

How to read a long list

A long list after a quiet month means very little. A short season simply does not touch most of a menu.

The same names appearing after a busy year are the signal. A dish nobody has picked across a whole season is doing one of three things, and they need different answers:

It is priced wrong. Compare it against the thing customers pick instead. It is invisible. Check where it sits in the calculator. A dish at the bottom of a long category gets chosen far less often than the same dish near the top, and reordering is free. It is genuinely out of favour. Retire it. A shorter menu that you can cook well beats a long one with dead weight, and every dish you keep is one more thing to prep, price and buy for.