Sunday night. Monday morning. Every week.
I help independent restaurants get a weekly food-cost routine running. I handle the setup; your team counts Sunday night, after service.
Nobody knows what happened in between.
- You’re on the floor every day. The number lives in your head, not on paper.
- You count what to order. You never count what you used.
- You’re certain your crew should be counting. You’ve done it before. It didn’t last.
- The information’s all there. Nobody has the time to put it together.
- Your POS has an inventory module. Setting it up was a job. Keeping it up was another. Nobody’s running it.
Invoices say what came in the back door. The register says what went out the front. Nobody knows what happened in between: waste, portions, over-prep, comps and staff meals. That’s where the bleed lives. Seeing it takes a count.
The walk-in bet
Ballpark — on a normal day, what’s sitting in your walk-in, in dollars?
Take a guess. Day seven of the program, I count it with your team and hand you the real number. Let’s see how close you were.
Your week, step by step.
- 1
Sunday night, after service: your team counts.
Built in the order you walk your kitchen. You never count prep — every dollar still lands in the week’s number.
- 2
Monday: you read one page.
A printed number every Monday, plus the week’s one fix. Every week builds your trend line.
- 3
Every week: your own number.
By week four it’s not measuring you against the industry anymore — it’s measuring you against you.
One count a week: Sunday night, after service. All the week’s invoices, receipts and credits. One sales report from your register. And one page to read on Monday morning. Your team counts on a printed sheet or a phone. One person photographs the week’s invoices. Nobody on your line has to learn software.
A number you can question.
Your food-cost percentage is the starting point. Variance turns the gap between your food cost and your target into dollars and shows where the number came from.
White Pine Kitchen & Bar, week of Sep 21
Demo kitchen · Real software, sample paperwork.
In this example, food sales were $10,700.00. Food cost was 34.7%, against a usual week of 30.5%, so the kitchen used $451.95 more food than its usual week.
That $451.95 is a reason to investigate. It doesn’t, by itself, prove waste, theft, or a problem with a particular dish.
Why trust this number
The AI reads your invoices. It doesn’t decide your number. The math is plain arithmetic — the same every time.
If a week’s numbers aren’t solid (a missed count, an unpriced item), the number says so. A number you can’t trust is worse than no number.
It’s measuring you against you.
Your target comes from your own recent weeks: the middle one. The industry range stays underneath, for comparison.
Day 2: every item on your invoices, priced. Day 7: your walk-in, in dollars. Day 14: your first real number.
Counting first. Recipes after.
I don’t start you with a recipe project. I start with what you bought, what you counted, and what you sold.
Recipe awareness means using your recipes to see where the food goes, dish by dish.
Recipe awareness is absolutely where I’m taking Variance, but I’m deliberately not building it blind. The first version gets you actual usage and weekly patterns without recipes. If you show me your recipes and item-sales reports during the program, I’ll study them — but recipe-level diagnosis isn’t in the promise I’m making you today.
It’s in the agreement: If I ship recipe awareness while you’re on the C$199 plan, it’s included. No upgrade fee.
Let’s look at your kitchen.
Here’s the free part. I need four weeks of invoices, and your food sales for those same weeks. Food sales — not the bar. I come back with two pages: what your records can say, and what they can’t. Price creep checked. No charge, no strings, whether you buy or not.
Fair warning — I can only hold 8 of these a month.