Food & beverage · 1 September 2026 · 1 min read
Nine out of ten restaurants do not know what their dishes cost
Not approximately wrong. Genuinely unknown. Recipes costed once at opening, suppliers changed, portions drifted, and nobody went back.
I have spent years in food and beverage and I have come to think the menu is the largest recoverable margin sitting inside a hotel. Not a new outlet. Not a new concept. The piece of paper you already hand every guest — the one that gets sixty to ninety seconds of undivided attention, immediately before they decide how much to spend with you.
So I wrote down everything I know about menu engineering and built the tools to do it.
An 18-tab Excel toolkit. Paste your sales mix in from any POS, and it classifies every dish, prices it three ways, audits your menu layout, costs a plate to the last garnish, and tells you in plain English how much volume you can afford to lose before a price rise costs you money.
A 52-page manual behind it — the method, then the actual procedure. Who does what, by when, with whose approval.
Both are free. No email gate, no course, no consulting funnel.
One thing from it, so you can judge whether the rest is worth your time:
A hotel in Stockholm raised the price of its canapés by one dollar. Volume fell from 220 to 210. They earned eighty dollars more that month. They cut a fish dish by one dollar — volume went 35 to 50, and they earned a hundred and sixty more. They raised a dessert their older regulars loved by a dollar; it sold exactly the same number and banked seventy-five.
Three items. Three hundred and fifteen dollars in a month. No new dish, no new supplier, no capital.
That is the whole argument. Not one dramatic win — a small verifiable win on three or four items, every month, on a menu you already own.
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