Finding Ideal Menu Items Assortments: An Empirical Application of Market Basket Analysis

This article applies a simplified version of market basket analysis (MBA) principles to explore menu items assortments, which are defined as the sets of most frequently ordered menu item pairs of an entree and each of five side dishes in a prix fixe restaurant. Using the PivotTable in Excel, the authors demonstrate the analysis of 3,727 transactions for meal combinations of 24 entrees and 49 side dishes, resulting in twenty-four association rules, which suggested that guests ordering a given entree would most likely then choose a particular side dish to go with it. Applying these association rules, guests responded favorably to servers' menu suggestions in roughly two out of three cases when the guest was "undecided" or "without preference." This article's chief purpose is to introduce the application of Excel that would otherwise require tedious computation if a restaurateur were to attempt it.