Restaurant & Food

Know what every plate costs you. Food cost is about a third of your revenue and most independent kitchens are guessing at it — we build the systems that tell you the real number, per dish, updated every time an invoice lands.

Sound familiar?

The three things we hear in every kitchen we walk into.

"We priced the menu off what the place down the street charges."

Which was a reasonable guess two years ago. Since then your protein, your oil and your packaging have all moved, and nothing on the menu moved with them. We cost every dish off your real invoices so the price is a decision, not a hand-me-down.

"Beef went up and nobody told us."

You find out at year-end, or when the accountant asks why food cost is up four points. Every invoice you upload re-costs your whole menu, and anything that drops below target margin gets flagged the same day.

"We order by walking the walk-in with a clipboard."

So you over-order what you can see and forget what's behind it. We turn your actual sales into a draft order twice a week — you review it, approve it, and it goes to the vendor.

What We Build

Built on the data you already generate — your POS sales, your supplier invoices and your deliveries — plus the weather and what’s on in town. Runs on your own server, no per-seat pricing, no lock-in.

Start here

Plate Cost

The number almost nobody has: what each dish on your menu actually costs to make, today, at today's prices. Most kitchens never work it out because entering every recipe and every ingredient is a week of evenings. We do that part:

  • Photograph your recipe cards or hand us your menu — we build the recipes for you
  • Upload a supplier invoice and it reads the line items, prices and pack sizes
  • Handles the unit maths — you buy by the case and cook by the ounce
  • Every dish costed: plate cost, food cost %, and margin in dollars
  • Upload the next invoice and the whole menu re-costs itself

$499 setup, then $99/month Setup includes building your recipes from whatever you've got — binder, spreadsheet or the back of a napkin.

We start from whatever you have — a binder, a spreadsheet, photos of recipe cards, or just the menu. Each dish is broken into its ingredients with quantities and yields, and every ingredient is matched to what you actually buy from your suppliers, including pack sizes and unit conversions. That mapping is the fiddly part and it's the part we do for you. From then on, each invoice you upload updates the ingredient prices and every dish that uses them, so the costing never goes stale. Everything runs on a server we operate for you, and the numbers are yours to export whenever you want.

$
Butter Chicken · plate cost
Your Restaurant — priced $21.00
31%
Chicken thigh · 180g$2.94
Cream · 80ml$1.12
Tomato, spices, rice$2.05
Packaging$0.38
Plate cost$6.49
Re-costed 2 days ago from your Sysco invoice

Illustrative example of the per-dish costing we build.

Menu Engineering

Once every dish is costed, your POS sales tell you the rest. We rank the whole menu by margin and popularity, so you can see which dishes are carrying the restaurant and which ones are quietly costing you money every time they're ordered:

  • Every dish ranked by dollar margin, not just food cost percentage
  • Your stars, and your money-losers, sorted worst to best
  • The high-volume dishes with thin margins — usually where the real money is hiding
  • What a $1 price change would do to your monthly bottom line

Included with Plate Cost

We pull your per-item sales from your POS — Toast, Square, Clover or a scheduled export — and join it to the plate costing. That gives every dish two numbers that matter: how much money it makes per order, and how often it's ordered. Sorting on those two together is what surfaces the dishes worth acting on. A cheap dish with a good percentage but four orders a week isn't your problem; a popular one at 44% food cost is. We show it as a ranked list rather than a chart you have to interpret, and you can filter by menu section or daypart.

Menu · worst margins first
Last 30 days — 214 covers/day avg
Fish & chips46%
Ribeye special42%
Chicken sandwich37%
Butter chicken31%
House salad22%
Fish & chips: 312 sold last month at −$0.40 each

Illustrative example of the menu ranking we produce.

Theoretical vs Actual

Your sales say you should have used 40 kilos of chicken this week. Your invoices and counts say you used 47. That gap is waste, over-portioning, or something walking out the back door — and most independent kitchens have never seen the number:

  • What your sales say you should have used, against what you actually did
  • Broken down by ingredient, so you know whether it's the protein or the produce
  • Tracked week over week, so you can see whether a fix actually worked
  • Costed in dollars, not percentages — "$1,840 last month" lands differently
  • Live stock between counts — every sale deducts its ingredients as it rings in

From $1,500 setup, then $249/month Needs a weekly count. We keep it to the twenty items that actually move the number.

Every dish you sell depletes its ingredients — that's the theoretical usage, calculated straight from your POS sales and the recipes we already built. Actual usage comes from your opening count, your deliveries, and your closing count. The difference between the two is your variance, and we cost it so it reads in dollars. We deliberately keep the counted list short: twenty or so high-value, high-movement items produce almost all of the signal, and asking a kitchen to count four hundred SKUs every week is how these systems get abandoned by the second month.

Variance · week of Aug 17
Your Restaurant
−$1,840
Chicken thigh40.2 kg vs 47.1 kg
Fryer oil6 jugs vs 9 jugs
Ribeye18 vs 21 portions
Producewithin 2%
Chicken variance up 3 weeks running — check portioning

Illustrative example of the variance report we produce.

Par & Auto-Order

Ordering is a forecasting problem, and forecasting is something software is genuinely good at. We turn your sales history into a draft order twice a week — you look at it, change what you want, and approve:

  • Draft purchase orders built from forecast demand, not from a clipboard walk
  • The forecast reads local weather and what's on in town, not just last year's Tuesday
  • Accounts for what's on hand, what's inbound, and how long each vendor takes to deliver — so you don't bottom out waiting on a truck
  • One order per vendor: produce, protein and dry goods each on their own catalogue, no supplier lock-in
  • You approve — nothing is ever ordered automatically without a human
  • Approving emails the real purchase order to your vendor
  • Prep sheets from the same forecast: how much of each prep item to make today

From $2,500 setup, then $349/month Includes the vendor setup and a pilot period where we check every order before it sends.

We forecast demand per menu item from your sales history, allowing for day of week and seasonality, then run it back through your recipes to get ingredient-level demand for the ordering period. Subtract what you have on hand and what's already inbound, round to the pack sizes your vendor actually sells, and that's your draft order. A manager reviews it in the browser twice a week and approves, which emails the purchase order to the vendor. We also gate it on forecast accuracy — if the model isn't predicting a category well enough to trust, it says so and asks a human rather than quietly ordering the wrong amount. The forecast also takes in local weather and the events calendar for your area, because a patio in a heat wave and a Friday with a home game are not an average Friday. Each vendor keeps its own catalogue and its own lead time, so the draft splits into one order per supplier and the buying window is measured from when that supplier actually delivers rather than from a single assumed lead time.

Draft order — Sysco
Delivery Thursday · PO #2214
Ready
Forecast for Aug 27 – Sep 2
Chicken thigh · 4 cs$412.00
Fryer oil · 6 jug$168.00
Romaine · 3 cs$74.25
Total$654.25
✉ Approve to send to your vendor

Illustrative example of the draft orders we generate.

Receiving & Live Count

A weekly count is a photograph. This is the video. Every delivery puts stock in and every sale pulls its recipe back out, so the number on the screen is what is actually in the building right now:

  • Receive on a phone or tablet in the walk-in — oversized buttons, no keyboard, wet hands are fine
  • Short-shipped or substituted? Flagged at the door, so you chase the credit instead of eating it
  • A price change on the delivery re-costs the affected dishes before the case is put away
  • Every sale deducts its ingredients automatically — the count moves without anyone counting
  • Use-by dates tracked from receiving, so you get a short list of what to run as a special before it becomes waste
  • Log waste and spot-check one shelf in seconds, instead of on a clipboard

Included with Theoretical vs Actual Runs on any tablet or phone the kitchen already owns — there is no hardware to buy.

Receiving runs in the browser on whatever tablet or phone is already in the kitchen, laid out for the cooler rather than for a desk — targets big enough to hit with a glove on, and nothing that needs typing. When a delivery lands, the order we sent is already on screen, so receiving is confirming quantities rather than transcribing them; anything short, substituted or repriced is flagged there and then, and the new price flows straight into the plate costing. Between deliveries the count moves on its own, because each sale depletes its recipe from live stock — the same theoretical usage the variance report is built on. That turns your weekly count into a check on a number that already exists, rather than the only moment anyone knows what is in the room. Use-by dates are captured at receiving, and anything inside its window appears on a short list the kitchen can build specials from.

Receiving · Sysco PO #2214
Checked in at the walk-in — 7:12am
2 flags
Chicken thigh · 4 cs4 cs — ok
Fryer oil · 6 jug5 jug — short 1
Romaine · 3 cs$26.50 → $29.75
Cream · use by Sep 63 days left
Live stock value$8,412
Short-ship credited · romaine repriced — 2 dishes below target margin

Illustrative example of the receiving screen we build.

Also available

Smaller pieces that bolt onto any of the above.

Price Watch

Your supplier raises the price of chicken and you get a message the same day telling you which dishes just dropped below target margin, and what to reprice them to.

Daily Flash

A text every morning with yesterday's sales, food cost and labour percentage. Thirty seconds with your coffee instead of waiting for month-end.

Multi-Location

Running more than one room? The same numbers side by side, so you can see which location is running three points hotter and go find out why.

Phone & Front of House

An AI phone agent for takeout, reservations and catering enquiries, automatic review requests after a visit, and win-back messages to regulars who've stopped coming in.

Start with one number

Send us your menu and one supplier invoice. We'll cost your top ten dishes and show you what we find — free, no commitment.

Send us your menu Book a free 15-min call