Insights for restaurants, retail and modern businesses.
Food waste is one of the largest controllable costs in any restaurant. Industry averages put kitchen waste at 4–10% of food purchased — for a mid-sized restaura…
Labor is the single largest controllable line item in most restaurants, typically 25–35% of revenue. When margins are tight, the reflex is to cut hours. That al…
Menu engineering was popularized in the 1980s by Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith. The idea: classify every dish on your menu by profitability and popularity,…
The biggest predictor of a smooth restaurant service is not the menu or the chef. It is whether the team executed the opening checklist. Most opening checklists…
A restaurant POS is the system of record for orders, payments, tips, inventory, labor and reporting. Choose the wrong one and you will live with it for years. C…
If you only track one number in your restaurant, make it food cost percentage. It tells you, in a single figure, whether your menu is priced correctly, your kit…
Industry estimates put restaurant no-shows at 10–20% of reservations, and rising. At a 60-cover restaurant with a 15% no-show rate, that is 9 empty seats every…
Third-party delivery apps charge 15–30% per order. For a small restaurant doing $50,000 a month in delivery, that is $7,500 to $15,000 a month in commissions. M…