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Daily build note · October 8, 2026

Plate Cost

Cost every plate down to the tortilla, see which dishes quietly eat your margin, and copy a menu price memo with suggested prices at your target food cost.

Local Business Automations Interactive demo live Static HTML/CSS/JS

What shipped

Plate Cost is a recipe costing desk for a food truck, coffee cart, or small restaurant. Each dish gets ingredient and packaging lines (pack price, pack size, amount used, and a yield percentage for trim and cook loss), and the app turns them into a plate cost, a food cost percentage, a margin per plate, and a suggested menu price at your target food cost, rounded up to a price that looks like a menu price (.49 / .99, .99, quarters, whole dollars, or exact). Every dish gets a chip (ON TARGET / THIN / UNDERWATER), the editor calls out the single ingredient driving the plate, and a menu verdict sums up blended food cost, weekly revenue, gross margin, and the yearly upside of repricing at the same volume. A classic menu engineering chart plots plates sold against margin per plate and sorts every dish into Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle, or Dog with a one-line action. A supplier price slider shows what a +10% or +25% invoice does to the whole menu. Copy a markdown price memo listing what to reprice, what to hold, and why. State saves in localStorage under plate-cost-v1.

How to try

  • Open the live demo. The Taco truck preset loads with a yellow THIN MENU badge: the carne asada and birria plates are over a 30% target.
  • Click a dish in the menu or a dot on the chart to see its ingredient lines and its biggest cost driver, then hit Use $X to apply the suggested price.
  • Drag Supplier price change to +20% and watch chips flip red and the repricing upside grow.
  • Try Coffee cart (the croissant and cold brew are the surprise) or Pizza shop (wings), edit the lines with your own invoices, and copy the price memo.

Scope trim

No unit conversion (enter the amount used in the pack's unit), no sub-recipes or batch prep, no labor or overhead, and no price elasticity: the repricing upside assumes volume holds. Preset prices and volumes are illustrative example data, not supplier quotes.

Limitations

  • Menu engineering uses the common rule of thumb: a dish is popular if it sells at least 70% of an even share, and high margin if it beats the volume-weighted average margin. Small menus can swing between classes on small changes.
  • The supplier slider moves every line by the same percentage; real invoices move one ingredient at a time.
  • Suggested prices only round up, and dishes already at or under target show hold rather than a price cut.

Suggested next steps

  1. Add unit conversion (lb, oz, g, case) and shared sub-recipes like salsa or dough, so one invoice change ripples to every dish that uses it.
  2. Import a POS item sales export for real weekly volumes.
  3. Add a per-ingredient price change and a simple elasticity guess, so the upside reflects some lost volume.