One dish out of four is under your 30 percent threshold. It is the cod, at 50 percent food cost since the June invoices, and it is also the second best seller. Removing it loses covers, keeping it as is loses money on every plate.
Three moves, cheapest first
MoveMove
EffectEffect
What it costsWhat it costs
Cod to 27 euros
Back to 42 percent
Two euros a customer notices
Cod portion 160 g to 140 g
Back to 44 percent
Nothing, if the sides grow
Cod off, pollack on
26 percent
A menu reprint and one week of habit
What not to touch
The risotto sits at 17 percent and carries the others. Raising it because it looks cheap would be the classic mistake: it is the dish that lets you keep the bass on the menu at all.
The bass and the beef cheek are stable. Nothing to do there this month.
example · not real dataInvented for this page. Every collection starts empty; the first run writes the first row.
The job
Restaurant food cost gets calculated on opening day and then almost never again. That is not carelessness: recosting a whole menu at every supplier increase is bookkeeping work, and service comes first. So the margin on a dish erodes quietly for two years, and the accounts are what break the news. This lab runs the calculation the other way round. It starts from the supplier invoices already landing on your desk, and it only speaks up when an ingredient moved far enough to change something on the menu.
What it would know about your business
Put there once, read by every magik.
Put there once by you, read by every magik, corrected when reality moves. Full on day one, unlike the collections below.
resource base
Supplier price lists
Recipes and portions
The card and its prices
01Cost this dish
02What moved on my invoices
03The menu that holds
What it would keep
Worth more in month six than in week one.
The collections belong to the lab, not to any single magik. Every magik reads them and every run adds to them, which is why this lab is worth more in month six than in week one.
WEEK 1MONTH 2MONTH 6
example · not real data
Dishesas it would fill up
Dish
Food cost
On the card
Margin
Chicken supreme
4.10 €
19 €
78 %
Cod fillet
7.80 €
23 €
66 %
Beef tartare
6.90 €
18 €
62 %
a sample, truncated
Invented for this page. Your Dishes collection starts empty and fills as you work.
Ingredients and pricesstarts empty
Suppliersstarts empty
Under your own brand
It wears your name, not ours.
The same lab, under your name, your colours and your logo. Your customers never see ours.
askmojo.ai
AskMOJO
your-business.example
Your business
The same lab under two brands: only the logo, the address and the colour change.
Your colours, in one field.
Your logo and your favicon, on every public surface.
Your own address, on a verified domain.
On the Pro plan, and not needed to take a lab. A fully bespoke theme exists as an upgrade, hand built rather than self-serve.
What it would plug into
Google Sheets
And whatever you already use: any tool available through an API or an MCP server, connected with your own account.
Why not another web app built for your trade
Built around your business, not the average one.
What it knows, what it keeps and what it does are yours to write, and two businesses running the same idea end up with two different labs.
Its sources are not a closed list.
A vertical tool ships with the sources its vendor chose, and that is the ceiling. A lab can be pointed at the ones your business actually runs on, connected from your own accounts, and everything they bring back lands in your collections, which you own and can take with you.
A tool built for exactly your job, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This is for the jobs nothing covers, or the ones spread across three tools today.
Questions · 8
What is food cost?
What the ingredients of a dish cost you, set against what you sell it for. Taken plate by plate it tells you which dishes carry the others; taken as one monthly figure it tells you almost nothing, because the dish losing money is hidden inside the average.
What is a good food cost percentage?
This is the one place where the honest answer is that a number found online is worth nothing to you. It depends on your menu, your service, your rent and your suppliers. What matters is the figure for your own dishes and which way it is moving, and that is what gets calculated here.
How is the cost of one plate worked out?
From your recipe with its portions and from the prices on your supplier invoices, ingredient by ingredient. Nothing is estimated: a line with no invoice behind it is flagged as missing rather than filled with a plausible price, because a plausible price makes the whole dish wrong.
I have no stock software. Would it still work?
That is the case it is built for. The calculation starts from your supplier invoices and from your recipes with their portions, not from an inventory kept up to the gram. Those two things exist in every independent restaurant already.
The price of butter moves every month. Do I start over each time?
No. You put in the new supplier price, and the lab tells you which dishes moved and by how much. That is exactly what the manual version never does: recost twenty dishes because one ingredient changed.
Is it going to tell me to raise my prices?
It tells you first where the margin goes, dish by dish, from your own invoices. What you do about it stays yours: change a supplier, revisit a portion, drop a dish from the menu, or raise the price. The lab pushes none of the four.
I already keep a food cost spreadsheet.
Then you already have the hard part, which is the recipes with their portions. What a spreadsheet does not do is reread itself when a supplier price changes, so it is right the week it was filled in and slowly wrong afterwards. That gap is the whole job here.
Why this rather than a tool built for my trade?
A tool built for exactly restaurant owners, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This lab is for the jobs no tool covers, or the ones spread across three tools today, and it runs under your name.
Who is playing this idea
Every audience is still open.
Nobody has taken a square on this idea yet. You declare your audience when you take the lab (“roofers in Brittany”, “plumbers around Paris”), and two people can start from the same idea on two different audiences without getting in each other’s way.
Sound like your week?
And it wears your name, not ours.
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The bundle describes a lab that does not exist yet : the jobs it would do, and an example of each output.
Google Sheets
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Gmail