Process
How to run a monthly food cost review in under an hour
Most operators audit their food cost once, in a panic, usually after a bad month. Then they never do it again until the next bad month. That is the wrong cadence. Food cost is not a project you finish, it is a thing that drifts, and the way you stay ahead of drift is a small, boring, repeatable check every month. Done right, it takes under an hour.
You do not re-cost everything
The trap people fall into is thinking a review means re-costing the entire menu. It does not. If you costed your dishes once and linked them to your ingredients, the monthly review is just catching what moved since last time and reacting to it. Most of the work is already done. You are looking for changes, not starting over.
The four checks
Here is the whole routine. Four checks, in order, every month.
The monthly review, under an hour
Pull this month's invoices and update the ingredient prices that changed, which in a linked system instantly re-prices every affected dish (the same fast trace as finding the outliers in your menu). See which dishes crossed your target, glance at your worst three by margin, and physically weigh a couple of key portions to make sure the line has not drifted. That is it.
The rule: a one-hour habit every month catches leaks while they are still small. The big annual panic-audit you keep meaning to do never happens, and the leaks compound the whole time you wait.
Why regular beats heroic
A small monthly check finds a problem when it has cost you a few hundred dollars. The once-a-year deep dive finds the same problem after it has cost you thousands. Boring and regular wins. Put it on the calendar, same day each month, and protect the hour.
Make the monthly check a habit
The free Menu Margin Check gives you the baseline numbers a monthly review runs on, so the whole thing takes minutes.
Get the free Menu Margin Check → Want it done for you? See the Menu Profitability Audit, or get the $97 costing system.