The #1 reason restaurants fail isn't bad food — it's bad math.

Most chefs I talk to have no idea what their actual food cost is on their best-selling dish. They "feel" like it's around 30%. But when you sit down and actually calculate it?

It's usually 38-45%. Sometimes worse.

Here's the thing — a 5% swing in food cost on a restaurant doing $40K/month in food sales is $2,000/month straight to the bottom line. That's $24,000/year from just knowing your numbers.

The 3 mistakes killing your margins:

1. You're not weighing waste.

That salmon filet you're paying $14/lb for? After trimming, portioning, and the piece your line cook "accidentally" cut wrong — your actual yield is 75-80%. Your real cost per portion is 20-30% higher than you think.

2. Your sauces and prep items are invisible costs.

That beurre blanc, that demi-glace, that chimichurri — they all have real costs. If you're not costing your sub-recipes and rolling them into your plate cost, you're flying blind.

3. You set prices once and forget.

Ingredient prices move constantly. The chicken thighs you priced your menu around 6 months ago might be 15% more expensive today. Your menu prices didn't move. Your margin did.

The fix is simple: cost every dish, update monthly, adjust quarterly.

I built a Recipe Costing PRO template that handles all of this — 150 ingredients, 80 recipes, 60 sub-recipes, automatic price propagation so when an ingredient price changes, every recipe updates instantly.

If you run a kitchen and you're tired of guessing, this is the system. 🔪