87-88% Expect both labour and food costs to rise
With payroll already consuming 30% to 40% of revenue before food cost enters the calculation.
Commerce & consumer
Payroll takes thirty to forty percent of revenue before you have bought any food.
And eighty-eight percent of operators expect food costs to rise again this year.
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5.5%
job-openings rate in accommodation and food services, among the highest of any sector.
What is happening
Payroll is eating the margin, and the roster was set last Tuesday.
$25B Annual cost of restaurant food waste
Around 11.4 million tons a year. Most of it invisible at the individual site level, because nobody measures it per shift.
Scheduling is guesswork against demand
Rosters are built on last week's pattern rather than on forecast covers, so you are simultaneously over-staffed and short.
Multi-site comparison takes until mid-month
By which point the site that slipped has slipped for three weeks.
Intelligence, plumbed in
Every supplier invoice arrives differently. That stops being a problem.
One line-level meaning for every supplier's format, a connector into your ledger, and a month of checking against the paper.
How we make AI survive real data-
Connectors -
A semantic layer -
Evals you can check
What changes
Judge us on this, not on what we built.
Per shift Labour and food cost visible daily, by site
Against forecast covers, so a bad week is visible on day two rather than at month end.
Waste Measured where it happens
By item, prep stage and shift — which is the only level at which anyone can actually change it.
Rosters Scheduling built against forecast demand
Using your own covers history, weather and local events rather than last week repeated.
Research
We wrote a full page on each of these, with the sources.
Each one carries its own figures and the citations behind them. Start with whichever sounds most like your week.
However hard, whatever it is
Labour cost is one example. Bring whatever is thinner than it should be.
We wrote this about the roster following the covers. If yours is waste, stock or a delivery platform eating the margin, that is the same work.
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01 We sit with you
Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.
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02 We read everything
Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.
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03 We break it to first principles
Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.
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04 Then we build
Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.
Where we sit
Your till stays. We build the roster that follows the covers.
4
What you get
- Per shift Labour and food cost visible daily, by site
- Waste Measured where it happens
- Rosters Scheduling built against forecast demand
3
Built new for you — none of this exists in your stack today
- A prep screen the kitchen needs no training to use
- A door counter so the roster matches the covers
- A daily sheet showing labour against sales by hour
2
The labour layer Reads your till and your rota. Books nobody and pays nobody without you.
Connectors, one agreed meaning per field, and a model reading what no
field holds. Accuracy measured on your own records.
1
- Toast
- Square
- Lightspeed
- Restaurant365
- inventory and purchasing systems
What you already run — unchanged, and still yours
If the till rang it, we can read it. A POS with no export, a rota on paper, a supplier invoice as a PDF. All of it can be joined.
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No API -
No documentation -
A terminal from 1994 -
It arrives as paper -
The vendor said no -
It reports nothing
Not a list of limits. Name yours on the call.
And once we can reach it, a model can read it. Most of the value here is in the sources nobody ever structured — the note, the letter, the screen.
Who this is for
The people who feel this first
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Operations Director -
Multi-site Manager -
Head Chef / Culinary Director -
Finance Manager -
Owner
Straight answers
The questions you would ask on the call
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We have a POS with reporting. Why is that not enough?
POS reporting tells you what sold. It does not connect that to labour scheduled, stock consumed and waste produced for the same shift, and the margin question lives in that combination.
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How many sites do we need for this to be worth it?
Usually three or more, where comparison across sites starts producing insight. Below that, the payback tends to come from waste and scheduling rather than analytics.
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Will kitchen staff have to use software?
As little as possible. If recording waste takes more than a few seconds, it will not get done. So it has to be almost instant, or worked out from data you already produce.
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What would AI actually do for a restaurant group?
Read every supplier invoice however it is laid out, and line it up with the till. We check a month of paper before you rely on it.
Next step
Start with your own numbers.
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We talk
20 minutes. Free.
You tell us what is not working. We ask how the work really gets done.
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We look at your data
A few weeks.
We read your systems, including the notes and letters no field holds. You get what is really in there, what it costs, and the accuracy we can hit.
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We build
A few months.
Only if step 2 says it is worth it. Fixed price, agreed before we start.