GrabFood best seller: find your top dishes and use them

Your GrabFood best seller dishes are in the GrabMerchant app, under Menu Insights, which ranks your menu items by units sold, sales generated and share of sales over up to 90 days¹. Menu Insights tells you which dishes carry your sales, and the menu works best when it is built around them: placed where customers look first, never out of stock at the rush, paired with what customers already order with them, and given the photo and the price they deserve. The dishes that never sell deserve a question too. This article shows where Grab gives you the figures, how to read them, and five things to do with your best sellers this month.

Where do you see your best selling dishes?

In the GrabMerchant app, tap the Menu icon on the Home tab², then the Insights tab³. You can sort and filter the list by duration, units sold, gross sales or customer rating⁴, and tap an item to see a chart of its sales trend⁵. Grab's quick guide to Insights describes the same view as the place where you can identify your most popular menu items and plan for future sales⁶.

On a computer, the GrabMerchant portal has a Menu section in its Insights tab that shows which items are most or least popular based on units sold⁷. Malaysia's guide describes it as the place to analyse your menu's performance, track popular items and create combos⁸, and the data can be downloaded as a PDF or a CSV for the past 90 days⁹. If you run several stores, the portal is where you compare them.

Which window should you read?

Choose the window before you read the ranking. The app lets you look back over periods from 7 days ago¹⁹ up to a maximum of 90 days ago²⁰.

• 7 days shows what is happening now: a new dish catching on, a dish that stopped selling after a price change.
• 30 days is the one to run the menu on: long enough to smooth out a rainy week, short enough to reflect your current menu.
• 90 days shows which dishes are your restaurant, whatever the season.

Read the ranking twice, once by units sold and once by gross sales⁴. A cheap side dish can sell the most units and bring little; a dish that sells half as often at twice the price may matter more to your month.

What should you do with your best sellers?

Put them first. Research on printed restaurant menus found that placing menu items at the beginning or end of their category increases their popularity by about 20%¹², in two studies published in Judgment and Decision Making¹³. Put your best seller first in its category, and put your best category near the top of the menu.

Never let them run out unannounced. A best seller that runs out at 8 pm loses its orders and can lead to cancellations. If you cook it in batches, a sales limit can help prevent overselling when stock runs out¹⁴, and when it does run out, mark it unavailable at once: Grab's own best practices tell merchants to update out-of-stock items to avoid disappointing consumers¹⁵.

Pair them. Menu Insights also suggests combinations: it shows popular menu item combinations so you can create combo pairings¹⁰, and you can add a recommended combo to your menu in a few taps from the Insights tab¹¹. A combo built on what customers already order together can raise the basket without asking them to change their habits.

Give them the best photo. Adding photos helps customers visualise your dishes, making them more likely to order¹⁶. Your best seller should have your best picture, square, as Grab asks: photos should be in a 1:1 aspect ratio¹⁷.

Watch their price. Higher prices on GrabFood may discourage customers from ordering, as they can easily compare options on the app¹⁸. A best seller is the dish customers compare most; check it against the same dish at the restaurants around you before you change it.

What about the dishes that never sell?

Look at the bottom of the same ranking over 30 or 90 days⁷. A dish that sells almost nothing costs you more than its space on the menu: it makes the menu longer to scroll, its ingredients sit in your kitchen, and it can hide the dishes that do sell. Before removing one, ask three questions. Does it have a photo and a description? Is it in the right category, or buried at the bottom of a long one? Has it sold better in another season? If the answer to all three is no, take it off or merge it into a combo with a best seller.

Is the best seller the same in every market?

The screens are the same app, but each market's help centre describes them in its own words. Thailand's article describes Menu Insights in the app¹; Malaysia's and Singapore's describe the Menu section of the portal⁷⁸. If you do not see Menu Insights in your app, check that your GrabMerchant app is up to date, then ask Grab support which view your market offers.

What should you check this month?

• Your top five dishes by units sold and by gross sales over 30 days.
• Where each of them sits in its category, and whether it is first.
• Whether each has a sales limit or is switched off the moment it runs out.
• The combos Menu Insights recommends, and whether one is worth adding.
• The photo of each best seller: square, sharp, appetising.
• The five dishes at the bottom of the ranking, and whether to keep them.

Kontimo reads your GrabFood menu each month, dish by dish, and says in plain language which dishes carry your sales and which ones to rethink, so your menu keeps working for you.