Food Cost
Know Your Numbers.
Before They Know You.
Real-time food cost intelligence built for operators who can't afford to find out the hard way.
The Problem
Most Kitchens Are Flying Blind
Memphis Fire BBQ was a real restaurant. Good food, strong reviews, a team that cared. And for years, the owner ran the numbers the way most operators do — a spreadsheet updated once a month, gut-checked against whatever the POS system spat out, reconciled on a Sunday when there was nothing better to do. That Sunday never quite came. The spreadsheet fell behind. Prices from suppliers crept up in ways that didn't show up until the bank account did. At the end of year one of tracking properly, the gap was $96,000. Not fraud. Not waste. Just not knowing.
That story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the default. The restaurant industry runs on razor-thin margins — the kind where a 3% drift in food cost is the difference between making payroll and having a very uncomfortable conversation on a Friday afternoon. Yet most operators are making purchasing decisions with cost data that is weeks old, built on invoice prices someone typed into a spreadsheet in a different month, against recipes that were costed when chicken was a different price.
The math is simple, and that's the problem. When the math is wrong — when your brisket cost went up 8.5% and your menu price didn't move — you're not running at 30% food cost. You're running at 33.7% and you won't know it until month-end. By then, you've already done three weeks of damage. A wrong food cost percentage isn't just an accounting problem. It's a decision-making problem. Every plate you sell, every order you place, every price you hold — all of it is downstream of that number. And if the number is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong too.
The COGS Engine
Enter an Invoice. Watch Your Margins Update.
ChefLife's COGS Engine is not a reporting tool. It's a living system. Every ingredient you buy lives in the Master Ingredient list. Every recipe that uses that ingredient is linked to it. When a price changes on an invoice, the change cascades — automatically, immediately — through every recipe that ingredient touches. No spreadsheet refresh. No manual recalculation. Just truth.
The workflow is designed for operators who are busy, not accountants sitting at a desk. You enter the invoice — pick the vendor, see their items, tap quantities and prices. Thirty seconds. ChefLife does the rest. It compares each line item against the previous price. If brisket went from $4.50/lb to $4.75/lb, that's flagged immediately. Your food cost updates. Your recipe margins update. Your dashboard reflects reality.
The Price Cascade
Food Cost by Revenue Channel
| Channel | COGS | Revenue | COGS % | Target | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dine-In | $28,400 | $92,000 | 30.9% | 30% | Over |
| Take-Out | $8,200 | $31,000 | 26.5% | 28% | On Track |
| Catering | $12,100 | $45,000 | 26.9% | 28% | On Track |
| Bar | $4,800 | $22,000 | 21.8% | 22% | On Track |
| Retail | $2,400 | $8,000 | 30.0% | 35% | On Track |
That dine-in number at 30.9% when the target is 30% — that's the conversation you need to have on Monday, not thirty days from now. ChefLife surfaces it the moment the data exists. Because a restaurant that knows its food cost is a restaurant that can do something about it.
Vendor Intelligence
The Silent Price Increase Problem
Your broadline distributor knows something you don't: which of their customers are tracking line-item price changes and which ones aren't. The ones who aren't — they're the ones who quietly absorb a 4% chicken increase in March, a 6% fryer oil increase in May, and a 3% produce increase in July without ever connecting the dots. By Q4, their food cost is up twelve points and they're blaming the kitchen.
ChefLife learns your vendors. Every purchased ingredient carries a vendor code — the item number your supplier uses on invoices. When you enter an invoice, ChefLife matches line items to ingredients using those codes. It builds a price history for each item across every delivery. It knows what you paid for brisket in January. It knows what you paid last week. The gap between those two numbers is information your vendor would rather you didn't have.
That's not a market report. That's your data. Built from your invoices. Specific to your vendor account. When you sit down with your rep for a quarterly review and you can pull up a 13.1% price increase over ninety days, the conversation changes. You're no longer the operator absorbing increases. You're the operator who noticed.
The Triangle Model underpins all of it. Every ingredient has three unit types: the purchase unit (how you buy it — the jug, the case, the pound), the inventory unit (how you count it), and the recipe unit (how you use it in a dish). ChefLife converts between all three automatically. You enter a case price; ChefLife knows the per-ounce cost in every recipe that calls for an ounce. No manual conversion. No rounding errors. No gap between what you paid and what it's costing you to produce.
The Monday Morning Digest
Seven Days Is the Right Cadence
Monthly reports are autopsies. By the time you're looking at last month's food cost, the damage is already banked, the decisions that caused it are a memory, and the people who could have changed something have moved on. Monthly reporting is what you do when you're not really trying to manage food cost — you're just documenting how it went.
ChefLife sends a Monday morning digest every week. Not a wall of numbers — a focused summary of what moved, what's drifting, and what needs attention before the week starts. Which items saw price increases on last week's invoices. Which revenue channels are running above target. Which recipes crossed a margin threshold. Seven days is short enough that you can still do something about it. The data is fresh. The team is in. The week hasn't started yet.
Weekly accountability changes behavior. When you know you'll see the number on Monday, you enter the invoices when they arrive. When you enter the invoices when they arrive, the data is complete. When the data is complete, the food cost number is real. That's the loop that Memphis Fire eventually got right. It wasn't a software insight. It was a discipline insight, made possible by a system that made the discipline easy.
The Principle
"A food cost percentage is only as reliable as the data behind it. If your invoices aren't entered, your food cost is fiction. ChefLife is built around making invoice entry fast enough that operators actually do it — so the number they're managing is real."
Nothing in ChefLife is silently overwritten. Every invoice entry is preserved. Every price change is linked forward to the new record and backward to the original. If you need to prove what you paid in November for a lender, an accountant, or a franchise audit — it's there. Always has been. Always will be.
Your Numbers Are Waiting for You.
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