Your food-cost margin always looks good
A dish with three euros of ingredients that sells for twelve looks like it leaves you 75%. It doesn't. Out of that comes the wage of whoever made it, the oven that was on, the rent and the accountant. gramo spreads all of that across what you produce and tells you what's left.
Why it hurts
Almost everyone costs a recipe with the ingredients and stops there. It's the number they teach at catering school and the one every spreadsheet template gives you. The result is a menu full of dishes that look profitable and a business that doesn't add up at the end of the month, without knowing which of the two numbers is lying.
How gramo solves it
Spread by time, not by percentage
The easy way is to add a percentage on top of the ingredients, but it spreads things the wrong way round: a cake that takes three hours of bench time uses far more overheads than a twenty-minute sponge, even with fewer ingredients. gramo spreads by minutes of production, which is what's really scarce.
Your costs, not an industry average
You enter what you pay: rent, wages, electricity, accountant, insurance, the depreciation on the new oven. Yearly costs are divided by twelve for you. With that and your production hours you get your cost per minute, which is nobody else's.
Two numbers, not one
You still see the food cost, which everyone in a kitchen knows and which is what you use to talk to suppliers. And below it, the real profit per portion. One doesn't replace the other, because they say different things.
It tells you when the calculation isn't complete
If you've entered half an hour of prep but not what you pay per hour, labour comes out at zero and the margin you see is wrong. gramo tells you on the same screen instead of letting you set a price with a broken number.
Frequently asked questions
- Which hours do I count?
- Only production hours. Not front of house, not paperwork, not the hours the kitchen is closed. If you include them, overheads get spread over more minutes than are really worked and every dish looks cheaper than it is.
- Are staff a fixed cost?
- Not entirely, and that's why gramo calls these overheads and not fixed costs. Staffing changes with volume even when it's committed. What these costs have in common isn't being fixed, it's that you can't put them on a dish by looking at an invoice.
- Can I leave it switched off?
- Yes, and it starts switched off. Until you say how many hours you produce a month, overheads count as zero and your costings stay exactly as before. Nobody sees their margins move without asking for it.
Keep going
Try it with one of your invoices
Upload the latest one from your supplier and see what comes out. Thirty days free, no card.
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