Food cost vs prime cost
Two numbers that get used as if they were one. What each measures, how Forkluck computes them, and what to do when either starts to drift.
Revenue and expenses have a kitchen version, and it is food cost and prime cost. They are not the same number and they do not answer the same question.
Food cost
Food cost is the ingredient cost of what you actually sold, as a share of net sales. Sell $4,000 of pastry that took $1,100 of flour, butter, sugar and eggs, and your food cost is 27.5%. It measures the recipes and the buying. It says nothing at all about how many people it took to make them.
Prime cost
Prime cost is food cost plus labor. It is the number that decides whether a week worked, because those two lines are most of what a kitchen spends and they are the two you can actually move. Rent does not care how your Saturday went. A great food cost bought with four extra hours of overtime is not a great week, and only prime cost shows you that.
How Forkluck computes each
Recipe cost comes from your current ingredient prices, which are the newest price by effective date, with the full history kept behind them. Labor comes from imported timesheets, with per-employee rates, the weekly overtime threshold and your payroll burden percentage applied. Sales come from Square or Shopify. All three land on the same dashboard, so food cost and prime cost are built from the same week rather than assembled by hand from three exports.
When food cost drifts
Check the price moves first, and check that you are reading unit price rather than pack price. A switch from a 10 kg sack to a 25 kg sack looks like a huge increase on the invoice and is often a decrease per kilo. Forkluck computes price moves on unit price for exactly this reason. If prices held steady, the drift is in the kitchen: portions and yields. A recipe that says it yields 24 and reliably gives 22 will quietly cost you the difference forever.
When labor drifts
Look at the overtime threshold. Hours past it cost more per hour, so a small scheduling change can move labor cost more than a pay rate does. And compare like with like. A Tuesday against a Saturday tells you nothing, which is why the comparisons are weekday aligned.
The lever: menu engineering
Once cost and sales sit together, each menu item lands in one of four boxes on margin against popularity. Stars earn well and sell well, so protect them. Plowhorses sell well and earn little, so reprice or re-cost them. Puzzles earn well and sell poorly, so move them on the menu. Dogs do neither, so cut them. It is an old idea and it still works.
FAQ
What is a good food cost percentage?
It depends entirely on your format, so we will not quote a number at you. Watch the direction yours moves week to week, which is the part that is actually about you.
Should I include labor in a recipe's cost?
Forkluck can cost labor per batch and per portion, which is useful for pricing a single item. For judging a week, use prime cost, because that counts the hours you paid for whether or not they went into a recipe.
Why did my food cost move when no price changed?
Your sales mix moved. Selling more of a low margin item raises your overall food cost even when every recipe cost stayed exactly the same.
Do I need labor data to use Forkluck?
No. Recipes, ingredients and sales work on their own and give you food cost. Adding timesheets is what turns that into prime cost.