Recipe costing at the real cost of every batch

What a recipe costing is, and why it usually fails

A recipe costing is a dish’s cost sheet: which ingredients go in, in what quantity, what each one costs and, from that, what a portion costs and what margin it leaves at menu price.

In most kitchens it lives in a spreadsheet with the price from the last order or the supplier’s list price. And that is the problem: the oil you are using today was bought three weeks ago at a different price, the supplier put hake up on Monday and nobody touched the sheet. The margin on the costing and the margin in the P&L stop matching, and you cannot tell which dish the difference went into.

Real cost per batch, not list price

In FoodSync every delivery is recorded as a batch, with its price and its expiry date. The cost of what gets used comes from what you paid for those batches, so the recipe costing and the cost of goods in your P&L tell the same story.

When an older movement is missing its price, the result is flagged as estimated rather than invented. Better to know a figure is approximate than to believe one that is not.

• Recipe costings with live cost and margin
• Preparations: a stock or a sauce is a recipe other dishes use, with its allergens inherited
• Price-increase alert when you confirm the delivery note
• Price history per ingredient
• If a price is missing, the cost is flagged as estimated

From recipe costing to menu

With the real cost of each dish, menu engineering stops being a theoretical exercise. FoodSync places every dish in a quadrant by sales volume and margin, measured against the rest of your own menu rather than a generic benchmark: stars, popular, worth pushing and needs a look.

It does not tell you a dish sells badly. It tells you what to push in service, whose price to revisit and which recipe to rework. And when you put together the set menu, it suggests dishes by margin and by what expires first.

Waste, in euros

What gets binned stops being an end-of-service anecdote and runs through the margin. The P&L separates gross margin, margin after waste and net margin, so you can see what everything that never reaches the plate is costing you.