03 · Cost of goods
You find out your GP dropped six weeks after it happened
And by then nobody can tell you whether it was waste, theft, a supplier price rise or a heavy hand on the pour.
“I know my food cost is out. I just can’t tell you where, and by the time the P&L lands it’s ancient history.”Composite of operator language found across review sites and forums
Why it happens
Recipe costing lives in a spreadsheet, supplier invoices arrive as PDFs, the POS knows what sold but not what it cost, and the stocktake happens monthly if you’re lucky. Without sale → recipe → depletion running continuously, theoretical and actual usage can’t be compared, so variance can’t be attributed. And most inventory modules bolted onto a POS need recipes maintained by hand — so they decay within a quarter and get abandoned.
What we'd do about it
Depletion through the recipe card, every single sale
Sell the parma, and the schnitzel, the ham, the cheese and the oil all move. Theoretical usage builds itself all week instead of once a quarter.
Stop being the integration
One product list, priced once. One record moving from sale to stock to COGS to the ledger, instead of you carrying numbers between five systems.
One number, with the working shown
Click the consolidated figure, drill to the venue, to the shift, to the transaction. A dashboard isn’t the same as a number you’d bet on.
The objection this page has to beat
“I’ve bought inventory software before. Nobody kept the recipes up to date.”
That’s the real objection and it isn’t about features, it’s about maintenance. So the answers are: what happens to costings when you change the menu, what happens when a supplier price rises, and how long a weekly count actually takes on a phone. One venue saying “we count Sunday night in forty minutes” beats any dashboard screenshot.
What we can actually stand behind
Every claim below is labelled by how solid it is. The grey ones are where we looked and found nothing credible — those stay off the page rather than getting rounded up into a statistic.
- Independent
Australian foodservice wastes $6.4 billion of food a year — 17.6% of the nation’s food waste by value — averaging $66,740 per business per year.
End Food Waste Australia / Fight Food Waste CRC, Foodservice Sector Action Plan - Independent
Cost of sales runs 31–39% for Australian restaurants and 33–42% for cafés.
ATO small business benchmarks, 2023–24 - Vendor study
54% of operators name food costs and inflation their biggest inventory challenge, up from 39% a year earlier.
TouchBistro, 2026 American State of Restaurants Report - No data
No credible Australian figure exists for what one percentage point of GP is worth to an average venue, or for hours spent on a stocktake.
Worth measuring across your own customer base.