Enter each dish's plate cost, units sold, and menu price, then your actual purchases for the period — and see your ideal vs. actual food cost and the variance gap where money leaks.
Knowing your ideal number is step one. If you'd rather not chase the gap between ideal and actual by hand, Lowboy tracks it live — freeing you up for the craft, not the calculator.
Ideal food cost is what your food cost should be if every plate used exactly its recipe. Actual food cost is what you really spent. The gap between them is variance — the money slipping out through waste, over-portioning, and price creep.
In the example, recipes say you should have spent $2,940 (24.5%), but you actually bought $3,300 (27.5%). That's a 3.0-point gap worth $360 this period — real money to go find.
Most operators aim to keep variance within 1–3 points of ideal. A wider gap means it's worth tightening portioning, receiving, and counts. Build accurate plate costs first with the plate cost calculator, and check your headline number with the food cost % calculator.
Variance is only useful if the inputs are real — and hand-entering plate costs, counts, and purchases is exactly the work nobody has time for, so it goes stale. Lowboy is the sous-chef for the back of house: snap the invoices, counts, and sales you already handle, and it computes ideal vs. actual food cost from your real numbers, traces every dollar of variance back to its source, and keeps it current on its own. The same paper you already touch becomes live, actionable numbers that save you money and time — without changing how you work.
Lowboy is $149/mo or $1,490/yr (two months free), with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The audit below is free and finds your variance first.
Snap invoices, counts, and sales. No login, no card. About 3 minutes.
Do the math: a kitchen spending about $50,000 a month on food that trims that by just 1% saves roughly $500 a month — about 3.4× the $149 plan. One caught price hike or one re-priced dish usually clears it.
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 →