Menu intelligence, for the people who write menus

Where the data comes from

We read the menus venues publish on their own websites, and archived copies of them, at a polite pace and only where the site allows it. Each menu is turned into dishes, sections and prices, and every dish keeps a pointer back to the menu it came from.

We started deep rather than wide: Chinese menus in Melbourne, so a comparison rests on a real market rather than a handful of venues. Each menu is also sorted by format (takeaway, dumpling house, hot pot, noodle bar), so a takeaway is compared with takeaways once a format has enough menus. New cuisines and areas follow.

How to read an answer

Cartemark tells you what the market carries, not what you should do. A venue may leave a popular dish off on purpose, because of its margin or because it is not what the kitchen does. Every share we report carries how sure we are that two dishes are the same dish, and every report ends on what you have that nobody else does.

We report the market as ranges, medians and shares, and never compare against fewer than five menus, so no answer describes a single venue. The menus we hold are never listed or shown on their own.

If your menu is part of the market

Your menu only ever counts towards medians and shares; nobody can look it up or compare against it alone. If you would rather it was not included at all, tell us and we will remove it.