Restaurant food cost: five numbers to check every week

Takings tell you how busy you were. They do not tell you whether the week made money. Five numbers do a better job.

The five

• Food cost as a share of food sales, for the week and against the last four weeks.
• Waste: what was thrown away, and why (spoiled, mistake, returned).
• Your top five dishes by sales and by margin. They are often different dishes.
• Void and discount totals, by shift.
• Stock on hand against what your recipes say you should have used.

Why recipes matter

When each dish is linked to its ingredients, selling a plate takes the right amount from stock. Then the gap between what you should have used and what you did use stops being a feeling and becomes a figure. Large gaps point to waste, portioning or theft, and you can look at them by shift.

Plateform360 is built around this idea: orders, kitchen, stock and recipes in one place, so the numbers above are a report and not a weekend project.