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 available 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.
We connect to your systems in under 10 minutes. First Morning Receipt by 6 AM.
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