The best operators don’t plan restaurant promotions around what feels popular. The better approach is to build around what’s profitable, and use data to find where popularity and margin overlap.

Why bundles & combos matter

A well-designed combo does three things at once: 

• increases average order value

• reduces friction for customers ("I’d like to have the meal deal please")

• helps move strategic products with stronger margins

But this will only happen if they're built on what customers actually want, priced to protect your margin, and tracked after launch. Here's how to do all three using the tools available to you in the Nomni ecosystem.

The Combo Strategy Matrix to create a profitable meal deal

To build restaurant combos that actually sell, match high-volume anchor items with high-margin companions using your POS and COGS data, then track performance via price trigger reports.

But before building combos, it helps to understand what you're actually trying to achieve with a bundle. Not all combos have the same job.

Keep this in mind as you work through the reports below. The data will tell you which type of combo your venue actually needs right now.

Step 1: Find Your Anchors

Every good combo needs an anchor, a product customers already want, that draws them toward the deal.

Use the Top Selling Products report in Nomni POS or Nomni Insights to identify your highest-volume items. Your best anchor products usually:

• already convert consistently

• have strong repeat demand

• require little customer education

You’re not trying to change customer behaviour. Instead, you’re simply increasing basket size around existing demand. But popularity alone isn’t enough.

A high-volume item with weak margins can become an expensive traffic driver if you discount it incorrectly. That’s why the next step matters.

Step 2: Identify Your High-Margin Items 

Easily pull your item-level margin data from Nomni Procure’s TCOGS report. The report shows you net sales, cost of goods (COGS), and, most usefully, GP% (gross profit percentage) for each item on your menu. You don't need to calculate anything; the margin is right there.

Sort your menu by GP% and group your products into four buckets:

EXAMPLE:A café sees their flat white is high volume but sits at 60% GP, while their banana bread is low volume but 75% GP. A "Morning Combo" that combines a flat white + banana bread at a modest discount uses the flat white as the draw and the banana bread as the margin engine. Even with a $1.50 discount on the pair, the blended GP on the transaction is higher than a flat white sold alone.

Step 3: Validate your pairing

Once you’ve chosen the right candidates, before building anything, check whether customers are already buying these together, or whether there's a natural category connection. In the Basket Analysis report on Nomni Insights select your anchor product and choose the category that the companion belongs to. The report will then show which items from that category appear most frequently in the same transaction as your anchor, and what percentage of the time.

What you're looking for:

• If the pairing already has a decent co-occurrence rate: Validates natural behaviour. A combo formalises and incentivises something customers already do.

• If the co-occurrence is very low: Not a dealbreaker. It may mean customers aren't buying the item simply because it's not being suggested. A well-placed pop-up featuring the combo can create the habit.

• If there's a different item in that category with a higher co-occurrence: Strongly consider swapping so you're working with the grain of customer behaviour rather than against it.

Step 4: Check the Day-Part

A combo needs both items to be wanted at the same time for it to work. Use the Hourly Sales report in Nomni POS and the Product Trend heatmap on Nomni Insights to confirm your combo components peak at the same hour.

This step also reveals day-part bundling opportunities you might have missed entirely. If you notice a dip in revenue between 2pm and 4pm, that's a signal to build a specific afternoon combo with a specific offer using a high-margin item as the value proposition during a quiet window.

Step 5: Build it in Nomni POS

By this point you know your anchor, your margin companion, and when the combo should run. Now choose the right setup based on your strategy. Most POS systems give you one way to run a promotion, but Nomni ensures that you're never forcing your combo into a setup that doesn't fit. 

Step 6: Track what actually happened

Setting this up is not the end, it's when the real data starts. Two things to monitor:

#1 Did the combo actually trigger? 

Go to the Price Trigger Report in Nomni POS. Filter by your specific price trigger and the date range since launch. The report shows every invoice where the trigger fired, how many times it triggered in total, and the total price change (i.e. the total discount given).

The Times Triggered number becomes your volume metric and the Price Change total tells you what you're giving away in discount. Set that against any revenue lift you can see in Sales Activity report on Nomni POS or Sales Performance Tracker on Nomni Insights to get a rough sense of whether the deal is pulling its weight.

💡Pro Tip: If Times Triggered is very low in the first few days, don't assume the combo isn't popular, check the setup first. Incorrectly tagged products are the most common reason a trigger doesn't fire when it should. Fix the tagging, then give it another week before drawing conclusions.

#2 Is it driving margin, not just revenue? 

Use the Sales by Product report on Nomni Insights to check whether your high-margin companion item has grown in volume since the combo launched. Revenue going up only matters if the right items are driving it. If the anchor is doing all the work and the companion isn't moving, the combo isn't achieving its margin goal. Adjust the discount, the placement, or the staff prompting before you consider changing the combo itself.

If uptake is low after two to three weeks, change one variable at a time (price first, then composition) rather than scrapping it entirely.

The bigger picture

The most profitable operators don’t treat combos as discounts. Instead, they treat them as margin strategy. Every bundle should answer one simple question: What high-margin behaviour am I trying to encourage?

That shift changes everything, because the goal isn’t simply to sell more food. It’s to:

• increase profitable attachment

• reduce revenue leakage

• improve transaction economics

• build smarter operational habits

That’s where data becomes commercially powerful, and it’s exactly what Nomni is designed to help operators do.

Want help identifying your best combo opportunity?

Nomni brings together POS, procurement, ordering, loyalty, payments and insights into one connected platform, giving operators a complete view of what drives profit across the business.

If you'd like help analysing your menu performance, identifying high-margin attachment opportunities, or building your first data-led combo strategy, reach out to our team. 

Because the best bundles don’t happen by accident, they’re built with visibility, control and the right data.