AI-Powered Food Cost Calculator for
Cost Savings Profit Boost Consistent Quality
Food costs are one of the biggest expenses in any restaurant - from ingredients and portion sizes to waste and spoilage. With Polaris ERP’s AI food cost calculator and recipe costing software, restaurateurs can accurately track ingredient costs, reduce waste, and price dishes smartly - all while protecting profit margins and ensuring consistent food quality.
How Does Polaris ERP's Food Cost Calculator Work?
In our system, the food cost calculator connects sales, purchase, inventory, and accounting with recipe costing software, allowing you to instantly simulate any price adjustments for your recipes. It calculates cost of goods sold (COGS), food costs, and gross margins, provides insights into revenue and profitability, and highlights top-performing dishes and costly ingredients. It empowers restaurateurs like you to optimize pricing and control expenses effectively.
With Polaris ERP’s food cost calculator, you can adjust recipes by modifying ingredient quantities, units, prices, or add/remove items to the recipe to gain a clear view of your real profit margins. The system takes into consideration past sales data to predict demand and give you accurate forecast regarding your expected revenue or profit margins.
This dynamic tool lets you simulate ingredient and menu item prices to assess the impact of changes, such as an increase or a discount. Access average sales, profit margins, and COGS, and see how they adjust with your pricing updates, over time. Here’s where you can also see your revenue order by channels, so you can spot the best and least performing sales sources.
This feature gives you instant insight into your sales – showing which dishes are driving growth and which ones are dragging you down. With built-in food costing software, you can see real-time performance and simulate future profitability for any recipe by adjusting ingredients or prices.
You’ll also get AI-driven recommendations for menu combos designed to boost underperforming items and overall profit. Think of it as your always-on menu consultant, helping you make smarter, more profitable decisions, dish by dish.
To help you maintain or increase the profit of specific menu items, Polaris ERP uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to gather data from across all your systems – inventory, purchase, sales, and accounting. It analyzes all the information on sales, ingredients’ purchase costs, suppliers orders and much more, to provide actionable insights and tailored recommendations, to achieve your desired profit goals.
How to Use Polaris ERP to Simulate Costs and Profits
In this video, we walk you through the Profitability Simulator. Log into your Polaris ERP system, select the time period you want to analyze, then head to Inventory > Food Cost Calculator > Profitability Simulator.
Just choose the dish you want to project, enter your target selling price, and click "Simulate".
You’ll instantly see projected revenue, profit margin, contribution to total sales, and estimated units sold — all based on your historical data, enhanced by AI for greater accuracy.
Client Results
Food Wastage Reduction
Using recipe management and precise cost of goods sold (COGS) for a local burger restaurant, they were able to bring food wastage down by 20% per year.
Menu Profit Optimization
The accurate food and recipe costing enables informed profitability analysis, with data-driven pricing adjustments to optimize menu profits and adapt to market trends.
Profitability Boost
With the menu engineering functionality of Polaris ERP, our clients can apply timely adjustments to impact popularity and profitability of each menu item, boosting their overall profitability.
Trusted by 1,000+ Restaurant Outlets in the Middle East & Europe, Serving the Industry for 10+ Years
Benefits of AI Food Cost Calculator
Profit Margin
Optimization
Simulate pricing or ingredient changes for menu items and receive actionable insights to adjust recipes or prices, helping you maintain desired profit margins and boost profitability.
Supplier Negotiation Insights
Spot ingredient price fluctuations in your suppliers' prices. Instantly and use this data to negotiate better deals with suppliers, saving costs without compromising quality.
Menu Profitability
Focus
Identify the most profitable and underperforming dishes on your menu with AI-driven insights and take action to refine offerings and maximize overall menu profitability.
Problems AI Food Cost Calculator Solves
Prevent Profit Leakage
It identifies fluctuating and hidden costs, waste and inefficiencies, helping restaurant owners to adjust prices or reduce expenses to prevent profit leakage and improve financial health.
Avoid Overstocking
It aids in accurate inventory management, preventing overstocking by ensuring you purchase only what you need, reducing excess inventory and associated costs.
Reduce Spoilage
By tracking inventory levels and ingredient usage, Polaris ERP helps to reduce spoilage and waste, ensuring that ingredients are used efficiently and before the expiration date.
Restaurant Food Cost Calculator FAQ
The ideal food cost in for F&B businesses typically ranges between 25% and 35% of a dish’s selling price. This percentage ensures that the restaurant can cover more than the costs of ingredients and other food items, but also labor, rent, utilities, and other overheads, while still achieving a profitable margin. The exact ideal percentage can vary depending on the type of restaurant, cuisine, and location.
Using Polaris ERP you can achieve a food cost as low as 20%.
A food cost calculator helps maintain consistent quality in dishes by standardizing recipes and portion sizes. By precisely calculating the cost and amount of each ingredient needed for a dish, it ensures that the same ingredients are used in the same quantities every time the dish is prepared, reducing variability, enhancing customer satisfaction and maintaining quality.
A food calculator removes inaccurate pricing by providing precise cost data for each ingredient used in a dish. This allows restaurant owners to accurately calculate the total cost of preparing each menu item, ensuring that prices are set to cover costs and achieve desired profit margins, eliminating guesswork and reducing the risk of underpricing or overpricing.
Yes, a food cost calculator can help identify and eliminate non-movable items from the menu. By tracking the cost, sales, and profitability of each dish, it provides insights into which items are not selling well or are not profitable. This allows restaurant owners to make informed decisions about which dishes to remove, adjust, or promote, optimizing the menu for better performance and profitability.
Take Charge of Your Food Costs Today
Stop Wasting, Start Winning!
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