MarginCub blog
Food cost %, menu engineering, supplier negotiation, delivery-app math. No email gate. Just read.
Food cost % = ingredient cost 梅 menu price 脳 100. Healthy targets: 20-25% pizza, 28-32% casual dining, 30-35% fine dining. Free calculator + 30-day fix plan.
Most small restaurants accept whatever pricing their primary distributor sends. This playbook covers the five levers - bid sheets, quarterly rebids, PAR commitments, payment terms, secondary sourcing - that pull 6-12% off your top 20 SKUs. Worked numbers, phone scripts, 30-day plan.
The average independent restaurant nets 3-5% of revenue. This breakdown of a $1M casual-dining P&L shows exactly where every dollar lands - and which 3 levers actually move the bottom line. Worked examples, category-by-category benchmarks, 90-day audit.
Most kitchens waste 4-10% of food purchased before it reaches a plate. On $30K monthly spend that's $1,200-3,000 monthly in the trash. This guide breaks down the four waste categories, how to measure each, and the 30-day plan that typically claws back 2-4 FCP points.
Most restaurant menus carry 2-4 dogs that quietly drain margin. Menu engineering is the quarterly habit that finds them, repositions the puzzles, and protects the stars. This guide walks the full process with worked examples, action playbooks, and a 30-day rollout plan.
Food trucks have a cost structure brick-and-mortar restaurants don't share - fuel, commissary, permits, event fees, generator. This guide walks through pricing that survives the first season, the per-event break-even math, and the menu architecture that drives margin.
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge 15-30% commission. Listing at in-store prices loses 18 points of margin per order. This guide walks through delivery menu math, the 3 strategies that work, and the direct-order pivot that saves the channel.
Catering pricing is fundamentally different from a la carte - every event is a one-off with its own labor, rentals, transport, and waste profile. This guide shows the per-person formula, a 100-guest worked example, the 3-quote anchor strategy, and the 8 costs most caterers forget.
Home bakers and cottage food operators almost always underprice. This guide shows the exact formula to include labor, packaging, and overhead - not just ingredients - with worked examples for cookies, cakes, and wedding tiers.
All these formulas in one tool - free during early access.