Ask a restaurant owner their food cost and you'll get a number. Ask how they know, and you'll usually get a shrug — the number comes from invoices divided by sales, which hides everything interesting. The gap between what you bought and what you actually sold is where margin goes to die.
The five leaks
- Portion drift — the recipe says 180g of chicken; the busy kitchen serves 220g. That's a 22% cost increase on the item nobody approved.
- Waste without a record — spoiled produce and burned batches leave the building unrecorded, so the same over-ordering repeats forever.
- Theft that looks like usage — without item-level tracking, shrinkage is indistinguishable from busy nights.
- Prep-area black holes — stock moves from main store to kitchen and disappears from accountability.
- Supplier price creep — the tomato price rose three times this quarter and your menu prices didn't.
Why spreadsheets can't catch this
Inventory spreadsheets die because they demand manual discipline forever. The fix is structural: connect sales to stock. When DineCore records a sale, it deducts each ingredient from inventory automatically — recipe by recipe, gram by gram. Two-level tracking (main store and kitchen) means transfers are recorded, stock-takes reconcile reality against theory, and the variance report shows exactly which leak you have.
Close the loop with your suppliers
Low-stock alerts become purchase orders, and if your supplier runs SupplyCore, those orders flow to them digitally — prices recorded, invoices matched, no WhatsApp archaeology. Supplier invoices can even be scanned and extracted with AI, so price creep shows up in your food cost the week it happens, not at year end.
Restaurants that plug these five leaks typically recover several points of margin — on the same sales, the same menu, the same rent.