Pricing the menu

Almost every restaurant starts with a multiplier: work out the food cost, multiply, round to something that looks right. It is a reasonable first pass and a poor permanent method, because a single multiplier applied across a menu prices cheap ingredients below what guests would happily pay and expensive ones above what they will.

Start from contribution, then sanity-check the percentage

Decide what each dish needs to contribute in cash, given how often it sells and what it occupies in your kitchen. Then check the resulting cost percentage as a sense test rather than as the target. That order matters: it produces different — and generally better — answers than starting from a ratio.

A high-volume item can carry a thinner margin because it contributes repeatedly. A slow, labour-intensive dish needs to earn more per plate because it will not get many chances.

Cost the whole plate

Underpricing usually traces back to underestimating cost, and the omissions are consistent: garnish, oil, sauce, bread that arrives unasked, and the difference between the portion in the recipe and the portion that actually leaves the pass.

Waste belongs in there too. If a proportion of an ingredient is routinely trimmed or thrown away, the dish's real cost includes it whether or not your recipe says so.

What to do about a dish that will not carry its price

Occasionally the honest answer is that a dish cannot be sold profitably at a price your guests will pay. Raising the price further will not fix it, and quietly shrinking the portion is a decision guests notice more reliably than operators expect.

• ✓Re-engineer the dish: a different cut, a different technique, a component that costs less and disappoints nobody.
• ✓Reprice the neighbours. Sometimes an item is fine and simply looks expensive next to something that is underpriced.
• ✓Accept it deliberately as a loss leader, if it genuinely drives traffic — but decide that on purpose rather than by inertia.
• ✓Remove it. A dish that cannot pay for itself and does not bring anyone in is occupying menu space that could.

Raising prices without losing guests

• ✓Move a selection of items rather than everything at once. A menu-wide increase is noticed as a policy; scattered adjustments are noticed as a menu.
• ✓Avoid moving your best-known items in the same round as everything else — those are the prices guests actually remember.
• ✓Change the menu at the same time. A new design resets the comparison in a way a reprinted identical menu does not.
• ✓Move in meaningful steps and less often. Frequent small increases attract more attention in total than one considered move.
• ✓Watch mix afterwards, not just revenue. If guests shifted to cheaper items, the increase may have cost you more than it earned.

Where the inputs live

Pricing well needs current per-item cost and current per-item sales, and both going stale is the usual reason a menu drifts for a year. Opero keeps recipe costing on the same spine as orders, so a dish's cost and its sales history come from one place, and product mix before and after a change is a report rather than a reconstruction.

For groups, per-location price overrides let a site price to its own market without the dish becoming a separate product, so it stays comparable across locations. Recipe costing and inventory are on the Growth plan and above.