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 · North America
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.
5.5%
job-openings rate in accommodation and food services, among the highest of any sector.
In North America
This is what it actually runs on here.
Platforms in this market
- Toast
- Square
- Lightspeed
- Restaurant365
- 7shifts
Rules that apply here
- FLSA overtime rules
- state tip credit law
- FDA Food Code
- ADA access
We read the rule before the call. It is the cheapest way to prove we did the work.
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.
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
- 7shifts
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.
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.
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.
Do you know the rules that apply in the United States and Canada?
For hospitality that means FLSA overtime rules, state tip credit law, FDA Food Code and ADA access. We read the rule before the call, so the first meeting is about your operation rather than about us catching up.
Whatever hospitality needs here, we can make it.
What you already run stays where it is. Around it we build software, hardware and the process itself. Here that means a prep screen the kitchen needs no training to use.
See everything we build-
Software -
Hardware -
Ways of working -
Whole ventures
Honest about the numbers
The figure above is from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS, for hospitality.
We have not localised it, because a number nobody can check is worth less than a real one plus this sentence. The pattern travels. The size of it in your market is a question for the call.
Same industry, other markets