u/Heavy-Specific7820

I’ve been speaking with a few chefs and noticed a common pattern.

Most are managing:

recipes in notebooks or memory

costing in Excel (or not at all)

inventory separately

production planning manually

One chef I spoke to didn’t actually know which dish was making money. Her most popular item had the lowest margin.

After she started tracking ingredient-level costs and margins properly, she ended up adjusting her menu and improving profitability without increasing orders.

Curious how others here are handling this:

Do you track cost per dish?

How do you account for overhead (gas, labor, wastage)?

Do you actually know your highest margin items?

Would love to understand what’s working (or not working) for you all.