A working prototype running a demo restaurant — the Demo Diner — with 51 costed recipes and 194 tracked ingredients. Try the invoice simulator: change a price and watch the alerts move.
Snap a photo. OCR reads every line item, pack size and price.
Ingredient costs refresh across the whole database.
Every recipe using that ingredient re-costs instantly.
Any move over 10% flags before it eats your margin.
Menu prices and next week's schedule re-check against target.
Food cost is only part of a plate. These monthly bills exist whether you sell one plate or a hundred — edit them and the true cost on every recipe card updates with them.
Real price history from Best Foods / Sysco invoices, Aug–Oct 2026. Threshold: 10%.
The spike is the story. One invoice moved this ingredient more than 50%.
| Recipe | Menu | Cost | Food cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Crazy Portuguese | $7.99 | $3.02 | 37.8% |
| Surf & Turf | $18.99 | $7.17 | 37.8% |
| Hungry Farmer | $10.99 | $3.38 | 30.8% |
Surf & Turf is a deliberate Friday traffic driver — the app flags it, you decide. Not every flag is a mistake.
Pick an ingredient, enter the price on your new invoice, and process it. If it moved more than 10%, an alert fires above.
Recipe cost is the plan. True cost is the proof:
(opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory) ÷ food sales × 100
Run it over one matched week, every invoice kept, quick counts at both ends.
Food that leaves without being sold still cost you money. Log it as it happens — the cost fills in from the recipe book.
| Item | Qty | Reason | When | Cost |
|---|
Cards from the Demo Diner's book. Tap any recipe for its menu copy and yield. Food cost uses latest invoice prices.
Every price dated by invoice, with change vs. prior. Red / green at ±10% — the same rule as the tracker spreadsheet.
| Ingredient | Pack | Current | Prior | Change |
|---|
Showing key ingredients from a 194-item database across Best Foods, Sysco, Pongo's, Market Basket & BJ's.
Know what the week costs before anyone clocks in. Edit hours or rates and the total updates live. Overtime is structural — it persists until staffing is right.
| Person / role | Rate/hr | Hours | Cost |
|---|
Targets: labor ~30%, prime cost (food + labor) under 65%. A real labor budget needs a month of clean timesheets from a trained crew.
Grill is the bottleneck station — until there's a grill cook you can trust, overtime lives in this schedule no matter how you shuffle it. The app shows you that instead of hiding it.
Your own AI avatar for the restaurant. Name it, pick how it talks, and it runs the place from your real numbers — recipes, costs, vendors and alerts.
Try asking: “What's my food cost?” · “Any price spikes?” · “Cost out the Cheesesteak Benny.” · “Log: 86 the rarebit tonight.” · “What do I need today to break even?” · “How much did I waste this week?”
Answers come straight from the same data as the rest of this prototype — no made-up numbers.