Ideals, ordering, receiving, waste, stock counts and PCA. The full food cycle in one place — for operators who want to stop guessing at margin and start controlling it.
"I thought food cost was a back-office number. Turned out it was the only number that mattered."
Food cost is the single biggest controllable number on your P&L. Move it two points in the right direction and you've found more money than any marketing campaign will ever make you. Move it two points in the wrong direction and you're working for nobody.
Most operators know this and still don't control it — because nobody ever explained the cycle end to end. So here it is: the six stages that turn food cost from a monthly shock into a weekly dial.
Every recipe has a theoretical cost per portion. If you don't know it, you can't measure waste. Build it once. Update when supplier prices move.
Order against next week's expected sales, not last week's stock. Over-ordering is the quietest form of waste — you don't see it, but it's rotting in the fridge.
Count it in. Check temperatures. Match to the invoice. Short deliveries you don't spot become short deliveries you pay for.
Every spoilage, every drop, every over-pour. If it doesn't hit a ticket, it hits your margin. No-one likes logging waste. Everyone likes higher margin.
Weekly. Same day, same time, same person. A count that shifts day by day tells you nothing. A count that runs like a metronome tells you everything.
Product Cost Analysis compares what you should have used (from sales × recipes) with what you did use (from stock movements). The gap is variance. Variance is where the money lives.
A PCA variance isn't one problem, it's five — and the trick is telling them apart. Theft tends to show up as clean, consistent disappearance of high-value items. Over-portioning shows as steady variance across staple ingredients — the cheese that's always 10% over. Waste not recorded shows as bursty variance on short-shelf-life items. Miscounts correct themselves next cycle. Recipe drift — the kitchen quietly tweaking a dish — shows as variance that only appears on one SKU and moves month by month.
If you can't tell these apart, you can't coach. If you can, you already know what conversation to have on Monday.
Menu prices don't move with ingredient prices. Oil went up 22% last year. Chicken went up 14%. If your menu prices went up 6%, your margin shrank and you never noticed. Price reviews should be quarterly, not yearly.
Deals and promos are built on old cost data. "Two pizzas for £15" was a great deal when cheese was £3/kg. It's a charity donation when cheese is £5/kg. Every promo needs the ideal cost re-checked before it runs.
Aggregator items aren't re-priced for the uplift. You pay commission on gross. If your aggregator price doesn't include a sensible uplift, you're eating the commission out of your own margin. On the order page looks like the same price; on the P&L, it's a different business.
Book a 20-minute demo. We'll walk you through ideals, waste, stock counts and PCA in the Andromeda dashboard — using real kitchens, not screenshots.
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