Cost management, plate by plate

Know what every plate costs. Today, not last month.

Recipe build-up from live supplier prices. Per-channel margin after the marketplace takes its cut. Threshold alerts when a dish drops below your floor.

The truth

Most operators don't know which dishes actually make money on each channel.

That's not a slight. It's the truth most operators tell us within the first ten minutes of a walk-through.

You know the headline numbers. Daily revenue, channel mix, busy nights. You know which dishes sell. What you usually don't know — until you sit down with a calculator on a Sunday — is what each plate actually returns on each channel, after the supplier price moved last week and after the marketplace took its commission.

The POS pretends the commission isn't there. The supplier price sits in last month's spreadsheet. The recipe cost is a number somebody calculated when the menu launched. Three months later, tomato is up 28 percent (illustrative) and the burger margin is quietly negative on the channel that's doing the most volume.

We do volume. The screens don't talk. That's the version we hear.

Recipe-level COGS

True margin per dish. Updated when supplier prices move.

Each dish on your menu has a recipe. The recipe has ingredients. Each ingredient has a supplier price, and that supplier price moves.

dojofood holds the recipe build-up — every gram of mince, every slice of tomato, every gram of cheese, every modifier — and pulls the supplier price from your inventory. When tomato goes from 18 ₺/kg to 23 ₺/kg (illustrative), the burger's true COGS updates the same minute. So does the margin.

You don't have to "run the report" once a quarter. The number is always current. The dashboard shows you which dishes moved most this week and why — usually because one supplier line moved.

  • Recipe build-up: every ingredient, every modifier, every yield rule
  • Supplier prices update from inventory — manually entered or via supplier feed
  • True COGS recalculates the moment the input price changes
  • Modifier costs roll into the dish cost (extra cheese is a real number, not a guess)
Per-channel margin

A Wolt order isn't a dine-in order. We do the subtraction.

Most POS systems quote you a single margin per dish. One number. As if a dine-in burger and an Uber Eats burger return the same money.

They don't. An Uber Eats order pays Uber Eats' commission. A Wolt order pays Wolt's commission. A Bolt Food order pays Bolt Food's commission. The commission is a real cost. Pretending it isn't is how operators end up doing high volume on channels that quietly lose money.

dojofood shows you the margin per dish per channel — after commission, after delivery fee splits, after marketplace promo discounts when you've run them. Five rows per dish:

  • Dine-in margin
  • Takeaway margin
  • Uber Eats margin (after commission)
  • Wolt margin (after commission)
  • Bolt Food margin (after commission)

(A row appears for every marketplace you run, the moment its integration is live.)

This is the number most operators have never seen on a screen. It changes which dishes they push on which channel.

Threshold alerts

Set the margin floor. We flag the dish before it crosses it.

You set a margin floor per dish, per channel, or by category. 35% on dine-in mains. 22% on Uber Eats mains. Whatever your number is.

When the supplier price moves and a dish slides under the floor on any channel, dojofood flags it. Not a daily digest — the moment it happens. Three places: the cost dashboard, the morning email, and a push to whoever owns pricing.

What you do about it is your call:

  • Raise the price on that channel
  • Renegotiate with the supplier
  • Pull the dish from the menu on that channel only
  • Accept the lower margin for now, knowing the number

The tool doesn't have an opinion. It tells you the floor broke. You decide.

Labor and waste

The other two costs that move every day.

Plate cost is one input. The two costs that move with you every shift are labor and waste.

Labor cost ratio

Shift-level. Hours rostered × wage rate against revenue earned in that shift. Live during the shift, not on Monday morning when it's too late. When the lunch shift hits 38% labor and your floor is 32%, you see it on the manager screen, you can pull a head before dinner.

Waste cost

Linked to the inventory waste records — what got thrown, what got staff-meal'd, what got 86'd because it spoiled. Each waste line carries the recipe cost it cost you. A weekly waste number that's a real currency figure, not a guess.

Both feed into a single operations cost view, against revenue, by shift, by day, by branch.

Who sees what

Role-based visibility. Suppliers don't see margin. Shift managers don't see supplier prices.

Cost data is sensitive. dojofood lets you scope visibility.

Owner / GM

Full margin view, all channels, all branches.

Shift manager

Labor ratio and waste for their shift, no supplier prices.

Head chef

Recipe costs, supplier prices, no commission breakdown.

Multi-branch operator

Branch-level rollups, no individual recipe granularity by default.

Franchisee

Their books only, never HQ's.

Set once at onboarding. Adjusted per role per branch when something changes.

See a cost build-up

See a cost build-up. Bring your top-selling dish.

20 minutes with our team. Show us one dish — your best seller is fine. We'll show you the recipe build-up, the per-channel margin after commission, and where the threshold alerts would fire today. Live human, your language, under two hours when it breaks. Live in seven days when you sign.