The Plate Cost: Your Menu Has Three Items Quietly Buying Nothing but Your Time.

You priced the menu once. Your suppliers reprice it every week. The sample burger costs $4.03 on the plate — not the $3.45 the recipe card says — because trim, overportioning, and the to-go clamshell are food cost too. At $12.50 that's 32.2% against a 30% target, and the price that fixes it is ninety-two cents away.

How it works

• The Plate — one recipe costed honestly: ingredients, the waste factor (6–10% is honest; zero is a lie the walk-in tells you), plate extras, food cost % against YOUR target, and the exact price that hits it. Copy the tab per item
• The Menu Matrix — every item's sales and margin judged against your menu's own medians, with a plain-words verdict: STAR (protect it), REPRICE (popular but thin), PROMOTE (profitable but hidden), REWORK (or retire). Plus your true overall food cost weighted by what actually sells, and what a 75-cent lift on your top seller is worth per year
• The Sneaky Costs — the free bread, the clamshells, and the unlogged comps, priced yearly ($18,280 in the sample — a part-time cook, spent without a single decision), and the three-move year-one fix worth $12,103 without printing a new menu

Built for

Restaurants · cafés · food trucks · bars · caterers — anyone who feeds people for money and hasn't costed a plate since the menu was laminated.

What you get

One .xlsx file, four tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no subscription.