Ingredient prices get the blame. But the controllable leaks — portioning, vendor billing, waste, and 86 patterns — are where the real recovery lives.
Yes, food costs have risen. Protein, dairy, and produce prices are up 15-25% since 2022. But inflation affects every operator equally. If your food cost is 4 points above your best-run location, inflation isn't the explanation — execution is.
The controllable portion of food cost variance — the part you can actually recover — typically represents 2-5% of total food spend across a multi-unit operation. On $2M in annual food purchases, that's $40,000-$100,000.
The recipe says 6oz. The line is running 6.4oz. Across 300 covers, that's 7.5 lbs of extra protein per day. At $8/lb, it's $60/day per location. Annualized across 30 locations: $657,000.
Invoice prices don't match contracted prices. It happens more often than you think — 3-7% of invoices contain pricing discrepancies, and most are in the vendor's favor. If nobody is checking every line item on every invoice, you're paying more than you agreed to.
When a high-margin item gets 86'd before the dinner rush, you lose the upsell revenue. Track which items get 86'd, at which locations, and at what time. The pattern reveals either a prep problem or an ordering problem — both fixable.
Prep waste, spoilage, and mistakes that never get recorded. If your theoretical food cost says 30% and your actual is 34%, the 4-point gap is partly waste nobody is tracking.
Your menu engineering says the ribeye should be 18% of entrée mix. It's running 24%. The ribeye is your lowest-margin entrée. That mix shift is costing you margin even though total covers look fine.
The P&L tells you food cost was 34.2% last period. It doesn't tell you that 1.8 points of that is a vendor overbilling you can dispute, 0.9 points is portioning drift you can fix in a prep meeting, and 0.6 points is 86'd items costing you upsell revenue.
By the time the P&L closes, the money is gone. Recovery requires daily visibility — not monthly reporting.
Marty analyzes your food cost data overnight and delivers specific, dollar-level findings to each GM by 6 AM. Not "food cost is high." Instead: "$640 recoverable this week at Location 7 — $384 vendor pricing discrepancy, $196 portioning variance on chicken, $60 in 86'd item impact."
Every finding includes the dollar amount and the specific action. That's what turns food cost reporting into food cost recovery.
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