Food Cost & Margins
Food cost is the number that tells the truth about your restaurant. Revenue lies — a packed Saturday can hide a Tuesday that's bleeding cash. Labor costs fluctuate with the schedule.
But food cost percentage sits there on the page and tells you exactly how much of every dollar you're handing back to your suppliers. The formula is simple. What you spent on food, divided by what you sold.
Most concepts need that number between 28 and 35 percent to survive. The problem is that almost nobody calculates it often enough to catch the drift before it becomes a crisis. These videos cover the real mechanics — how to run the formula, how to price a menu that protects your margins, and what to do when the numbers start moving in the wrong direction.
The Drift Nobody Catches in Time
Here's how it usually goes. You open. The menu gets priced on instinct and a rough sense of what the neighborhood will pay.
For a while, the register fills up and nobody questions the math. Then your chicken supplier raises prices by eight percent. A new prep cook starts overportioning the salmon.
A popular special runs for three weeks and never gets costed. Each one is small. Together they move your food cost from 31 to 37 percent, and you don't notice until the quarterly P&L arrives and the money isn't there.
The fix is boring. Cost your recipes. Update the costs when your invoices change.
Weigh your portions. Calculate food cost weekly, not monthly — monthly is an autopsy. Weekly gives you time to adjust.
The Drift Nobody Catches in Time
Here's how it usually goes. You open. The menu gets priced on instinct and a rough sense of what the neighborhood will pay.
For a while, the register fills up and nobody questions the math. Then your chicken supplier raises prices by eight percent. A new prep cook starts overportioning the salmon.
A popular special runs for three weeks and never gets costed. Each one is small. Together they move your food cost from 31 to 37 percent, and you don't notice until the quarterly P&L arrives and the money isn't there.
The fix is boring. Cost your recipes. Update the costs when your invoices change.
Weigh your portions. Calculate food cost weekly, not monthly — monthly is an autopsy. Weekly gives you time to adjust.
“You don't go broke all at once. You go broke a half-percent at a time.”
The Numbers, the Formulas, and the Operators Who Use Them
256 videosVideos on food cost calculation, menu pricing strategy, margin analysis, and the franchise economics behind the biggest brands in food.
5 videos tagged “Menu Design”
7 PROVEN Ways to Increase Restaurant Profit Margins
Bausch runs the numbers like someone who's actually had to make payroll on a Tuesday when the weekend was slow and the walk-in died. Seven moves that aren't theoretical — portion control that doesn't kill the guest experience, labor scheduling that keeps your best people from walking, menu engineering that actually moves product instead of just looking pretty on Instagram. You're either running the margins or the margins are running you.
FOOD COSTING PROFESSIONAL FORMAT for Costing/ Menu Costing/Menu engineering / Bulk Recipe Costing
Chef Bain built a costing application that does what most POS systems promise but never deliver — actual recipe costing that accounts for waste, prep time, and the reality that your food cost isn't just ingredient cost. You punch in your proteins, your mise components, even your labor hours, and it spits back numbers you can actually use to survive another month. Anyone who's ever tried to engineer a menu around theoretical 28% food cost while watching their margins bleed out in real time knows exactly why this matters.
How to Price Restaurant Menu Items
You're either running the numbers or the numbers are running you, and most operators figure this out around month three when the food costs start eating profit faster than a expo calling out orders. The Restaurant Boss breaks down the two pricing methods that actually matter — not the Instagram-pretty theories, but the math that keeps the lights on when you're pushing 300 covers on a Saturday. Anyone who's watched their prime costs creep past 60% knows exactly which method they should've been using all along.
Before Opening A Restaurant: Watch This 8-Minute Menu Engineering Guide
I've watched too many operators price their menu like they're running a charity instead of a business, slapping cost-plus-thirty-percent on everything and wondering why the lights get shut off three months later. This eight-minute breakdown on menu engineering — the actual math of what sells, what doesn't, and what keeps you breathing — should be required viewing before you sign your first lease.
What is Menu Engineering
Look, if you're still pricing your menu based on "what feels right" or what the competition charges, you're bleeding money in ways you don't even realize. Menu engineering isn't some MBA buzzword — it's the cold, hard math that separates restaurants that make it from those that close after eighteen months wondering where it all went wrong.
Every time a supplier raises a price, your recipe costs change. If you're not updating them, your menu prices are fiction. Second: portion control that's enforced, not suggested.
The difference between a 30 and a 36 percent food cost is often one cook who eyeballs the protein instead of weighing it. Scales are cheaper than going under. Third: a waste log that gets used.
Not a punishment system — a diagnostic one. When you know where product disappears, you can fix the cause instead of guessing at it.
The numbers here connect to everything else. Kitchen Systems covers the workflow and prep structures that prevent waste before it happens. When the margins collapse entirely, Restaurant Failures shows you what the end looks like — and why it was usually avoidable.