Price your menu from real costs, not guesses

A menu price calculation is only as useful as the recipe beneath it. Include sauces, garnishes, sides, and prep components in the quantities your kitchen serves. A missing dressing or a portion that is larger in practice than on the card can make a profitable-looking dish disappoint during the month-end review.

Use approved invoice prices or carefully maintained manual ingredient costs. A dish cost from six months ago may still be useful as a historical reference, but it should not silently drive today's price decision. BOH Brain connects the catalog to recipes so that relevant ingredient price changes update the costs you review in the pricing workflow.

Different parts of a menu do different jobs. A signature entree, a side dish, and a cocktail may have different ingredient percentages and different contributions toward labor and overhead. Set category targets that reflect your own operating plan, then use those targets to identify exceptions. Avoid copying a single percentage onto every item without considering the concept.

A target is a management choice rather than a guaranteed industry rule. Ingredients, service style, staffing, rent, and sales mix all affect what the business needs. BOH Brain's pricing workflow lets you review costs against targets and focus on dishes that move outside them. That gives the team a concrete starting point for a conversation about price or recipe design.

To estimate a selling price from a target food cost percentage, divide the portion cost by the target expressed as a decimal. A $4.50 dish at a 30% target produces a $15 suggested price. That calculation covers the ingredient ratio only. It does not guarantee sufficient profit after wages, occupancy, card fees, or delivery commissions.

Rounding the result is a separate business decision. A suggested $15.17 price does not automatically mean the menu should show that exact number. Review a few realistic selling prices and compare the resulting ingredient percentage and contribution dollars. Keep the price your guests will see consistent with your positioning, portion promise, and other items on the menu.

A busy menu can produce too many alerts to review productively. Begin with dishes that sell frequently, ingredients with meaningful changes, and recipes materially above target. A two-cent increase on a rarely sold garnish is a different problem from a fifty-cent increase on a dish that goes out hundreds of times per week.

Suppose the latter increase affects 300 orders. Holding everything else constant, that adds $150 of ingredient cost over those orders. Your response could be a new vendor, a different build, a revised portion, or a higher price. Sometimes keeping the existing price is intentional. Record the reasoning and revisit it, so an accepted exception does not become a forgotten one.

BOH Brain's competitor tools use the menu information you provide. Compare similar items and categories, and inspect matches before treating them as equivalent. A lunch portion, a dinner portion with two sides, and a delivery listing may share a name while describing very different offers. A simple average can hide those differences.

Imported competitor menus tell you listed prices; they do not reveal competitor purchasing costs, sales volumes, profitability, or demand. Menu prices can also become stale, so review the date and source of the menu before acting on a comparison. Use the information to understand positioning, not as an instruction to match the cheapest nearby restaurant.

A pricing change should make sense alongside the rest of the menu. Check the gap between sizes, add-ons, and premium alternatives. Confirm that printed menus, online menus, and the POS will agree when you implement the new prices. BOH Brain can support the review, but a costing calculation should not be mistaken for publishing a price across every sales channel.

Keep a record of the date and rationale for significant changes. After implementation, compare the outcomes with your expectations using the sales information available to you. Ingredient percentage is one signal; contribution, sales mix, guest response, and waste are others. Revisit prices as a regular operating task rather than waiting for a year-end reset.

Start on Free by building the ingredient catalog and the recipes you want to evaluate. Five AI-parsed invoices per month are included, with CSV imports available as well. Pro is $75 per month and adds the pricing workspace, recipe analysis, vendor comparison, and competitor analysis along with unlimited AI invoice parsing.

For the first review, choose ten frequently ordered dishes and verify their portions with the kitchen. Include one prep component so you can check how its yield affects the final cost. Then compare current selling prices with your targets. That small, grounded review is more useful than repricing an entire unverified catalog.