A deli lives on high volume and thin tickets — a half-ounce of extra meat per sandwich, times hundreds of builds a day, quietly eats your margin, and the cold case turns product into waste on a clock. Lowboy is a sous-chef for the back of house: it costs every sandwich from your real invoices at the yield you actually get off the slicer, sets the target portion, and sizes prepared food to how the day truly sells.
You run a deli for the regulars and the craft, not to re-cost every item as prices move. Let Lowboy keep the numbers current so your time stays behind the counter.
You already handle the paper — Lowboy just reads it. Snap the distributor invoice, the menu board, a build sheet, the day's sales. Nothing about how the counter runs has to change; it simply adds a smart layer on top that turns the way you already build into numbers.
Then it works like a sous-chef watching the slicer for you: computed from your data, never guessed. "Turkey's up 16% — the club dropped to 39% cost, tighten to 4 oz or move it to $11.50." "You prep 20 pints of potato salad Mondays and toss 5 — try 15." Real invoices, real sales, real counts, turned into the two things a deli fights for all day: margin and hours.
Portioning, slicer yields, cold-case waste, high-volume builds — the parts of a deli where the margin actually leaks.
Bread, meats, cheese, spreads and toppings costed from your real invoices, at the yield you get off the slicer — divided by the menu price for a true food-cost on every build.
real marginSet the target portion per build and see what an over-portion costs. On a low-ticket, high-volume item, a half-ounce of extra meat times hundreds of builds is real money.
stop the leakCosts by the yield you actually get, not raw case weight — end pieces and shrink accounted for, so the deli-meat number is honest.
accurate costPrepared salads and cut items sized to how each weekday actually sells, so fewer pints and portions expire in the case. What you did toss is totalled in dollars.
less wasteSnapped invoices update the price book. When a core meat or cheese jumps, Lowboy flags every build it touches, with the re-price that holds margin.
catch creepEvery sandwich spec'd, portioned and costed, shareable to the whole counter — so a rush-hour build comes out the same from anyone.
consistencyLowboy's suggestions come from how your deli actually runs — your invoices, your sales, your counts — so they tighten both the margin at the counter and the hours behind it.
Most deli and sandwich shop food cost software makes you type a build into a box and assume every slice is a clean, uniform portion. Lowboy computes your real number from your actual invoices and sales — the turkey you actually paid for, the yield you actually get off the slicer, the sandwiches that actually rang up at lunch. In a deli that precision decides the whole business: tickets are low, volume is huge, and the margin leaks a fraction at a time — a heavy hand on the meat, a case of salad that turned, a cheese price that crept up unnoticed.
Costing is done the way you build: bread, meats, cheese, spreads and toppings priced from real invoices at true slicer yield, with a target portion per build and a clear view of what an over-portion costs. On the cold-case side, prepared salads and cut items are sized to how each weekday actually sells, so fewer portions expire on the clock — and what you do throw out is totalled in dollars so it stops being invisible. When a core meat or cheese jumps, every affected build re-costs and Lowboy flags the re-price that holds your margin.
See it on your own counter in about three minutes with the free food-cost audit, or explore the free tools first. No account required.
Connect your POS and your menu and sales auto-fill — the fuel for portion and waste sizing. Not on a supported POS, or not ready to connect? Snap a menu and a sales figure — Lowboy is POS-agnostic and works the same either way.
Add the hours back, too — no spreadsheet nights, no manual invoice entry, no rebuilding the prep list when the menu changes.
Less time on the back office, more time on the food, your crew, and the reason you opened.
Get your free audit →