Know your real food cost, not last month’s guess

Food cost is a gap, not a number

Most owners see food cost once a month, after the inventory count. By then it is a historical fact: it tells you that you lost margin, not where, and not while you could still do something about it.

The useful way to think about it is as two numbers and the gap between them. Theoretical food cost is what your food should have cost, given your recipes and what you sold. Actual food cost is what you really spent, given what you bought and what is left on the shelf. Everything in that gap (waste, over-portioning, supplier errors, theft) is margin you are paying for without noticing.

The two formulas

• Per dish: ingredient cost ÷ menu price × 100.
• Whole restaurant, over a period: (beginning inventory + purchases − ending inventory) ÷ food sales × 100.

Both are simple. What makes them hard in practice is that every input (ingredient prices, stock levels, sales, waste) changes constantly and usually lives in a different place.

How Khevio keeps the inputs honest

Recipes that follow your prices

Every recipe’s food cost recalculates when an ingredient price changes, so your theoretical cost reflects what you pay now. See recipe costing in Khevio.

Purchasing matched to what arrived

Send purchase orders, receive them against what actually arrived, and get flagged on pricing discrepancies before a supplier increase becomes a pattern.

Stock that knows when it is low

Set a par level per item and branch. You get a clear signal when stock drops below it, so you are not ordering from memory or walking the walk-in to check.

Sales that deduct ingredients

Connect your POS and each sale deducts the right ingredients automatically, with refunds handled correctly. No POS? Log sales manually and the rest works the same.

Waste logged by reason

Record spoilage, prep waste and plate waste separately, and turn supplier mistakes into credit notes instead of absorbing the loss. Knowing which kind of waste is growing tells you what to fix.

Where food cost usually leaks

• Supplier price increases that never made it into your recipe costs.
• Waste that goes unlogged because logging it is a hassle.
• Portions that drift from the recipe over a busy service.
• Receiving errors: short deliveries and substitutions nobody caught.
• Menu items priced off an old cost and never re-checked.

You don’t fix these by working harder at the month-end count. You fix them by shortening the time between the cause and the moment you can see it.

Built for independents and small groups

Khevio is built branch-first and priced per branch. If you are weighing options, we wrote honest comparisons against MarketMan, xtraCHEF, Craftable and Apicbase.