Two rankings that disagree
The default board ranks one way by the plate and almost the reverse way by the minute. Per plate: the double smash burger at 10.90, the chicken sandwich at 10.10, the veggie burger at 9.10, the single burger at 8.40, the loaded fries at 7.65, the shake at 5.90. Per minute of griddle: the fries at 8.35, the single burger at 5.31, the double at 5.03, the veggie at 4.55, the chicken sandwich at 4.04, the shake at 3.93.
The double burger falls from first to third and the chicken sandwich from second to fifth, because 150 seconds is a long time to hold the only griddle for 10.10. The fries go from fifth to first. During a rush that inversion is the whole game: you are not selling food for those minutes, you are selling griddle time, and every second of it is spoken for.
The blended figure and what it means
Weighting each item by its share of orders gives 106 seconds an order at the griddle and 9.08 of contribution, so 5.14 a minute, 34 orders an hour and 385 across a 75 minute rush. That last number is the ceiling for the rush at this mix. Nothing about putting another person on the window moves it, because the window is not what the orders are queuing for.
Dropping the weakest item does two things at once
Take the milkshake off — last by the minute at 3.93 — and the remaining orders redistribute across the rest of the board. Blended time per order goes up, from 106 to 107 seconds, because the shake was quicker than the average of what replaces it, so orders an hour fall from 34.0 to 33.5. And the money per minute rises from 5.14 to 5.23, so the rush earns 7 more.
Fewer orders and more money out of the same 75 minutes. The trade is real, and the seven dollars is also small enough to be worth saying plainly: on this board the shake is very nearly pulling its weight, and the assumption underneath the whole comparison — that everybody who wanted one buys a burger instead — is the part most likely to be wrong. Somebody who came for a shake and found none walks past.
Seconds are worth most where the volume is
Taking ten seconds off an item is worth almost exactly its share of orders and almost nothing else, because the saving lands on that fraction of every order coming through. On the default mix the double burger is 30 percent of orders and ten seconds off it is worth 11.23 across the rush; the loaded fries at 22 percent are worth 8.17; the chicken sandwich, which is the slowest thing on the board at 150 seconds, is only 14 percent of orders and worth 5.16. Speeding up whatever feels slowest on the line is the standard way to spend a morning on the wrong item.
When to ignore all of this
Outside the rush the station is idle half the time, seconds cost nothing, and the ranking reverts to contribution per plate. Most menu arguments on a truck are really an argument about which of those two worlds the truck lives in. If the queue never gets past two people, the per-minute column is noise. If there is a line down the block for ninety minutes four days a week, the per-plate column is.
Questions people ask
What is contribution per minute and why use it on a food truck?
It is the contribution an item returns divided by the time it occupies the busiest station, expressed per minute. On a truck with one griddle and one cook, station seconds are what runs out during a rush, so the item returning the most per second of it is the item that earns the most in a fixed window. Contribution per plate answers a different question and only agrees when the station has idle time.
Should I remove the worst item on my menu?
Removing the item with the lowest contribution per second always raises the blended contribution per minute — that part is arithmetic rather than opinion. Whether it raises actual takings depends on whether the customers who wanted it buy something else instead. On the default board, dropping the shake is worth about 7 dollars across a 75 minute rush, small enough that losing a couple of customers a day cancels it. The size of the prize is what this page can tell you.
Which station should I time?
Whichever has the least idle time during a rush, which is something to watch rather than assume. Trucks with a big griddle are often bottlenecked at assembly or at the fryer basket rather than at the cook surface, and a truck with one person taking orders and running cards is frequently bottlenecked there. Stand back during a busy fifteen minutes and find the position that never gets a gap.
Why did orders per hour fall when I dropped an item?
Because the item you dropped was quicker than the average of what replaces it, so blended time per order went up. Money per minute and orders per minute do not move together, and this is exactly where menu decisions get made badly. A board optimised purely for speed sells a lot of cheap fast items; one optimised purely for margin builds a queue nobody joins.
Does this work outside a rush?
No, and it says so. The ranking assumes the station is saturated, which is what makes a second of it scarce. In a quiet hour there are spare seconds everywhere, using them costs nothing, and the right ranking is contribution per plate again. A truck that runs one saturated rush and six flat hours has two different correct answers depending on the time of day.