A Look Inside Lettuce Entertain You: How Inventory, Recipes, and Prep Come Together
- COGS-Well Team
- 18 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants has been shaping the restaurant industry since 1971. As a family-owned group with more than 120 restaurants and 60 brands across the country, operational consistency and cost control are essential.
One of those brands is Beatrix, a neighborhood restaurant and coffeehouse with five
locations in Chicago's River North, Loop, Streeterville, Fulton Market, and Oak Brook neighborhoods. Supporting Beatrix – along with several other Lettuce brands – is Dan West, Divisional Chef de Cuisine.
“I had been saying for years that we should really be using something like COGS-Well. It was actually a chef in one of the restaurants who wanted to do something different.”
That push for something better sparked a rollout of the Lettuce brands with a phased implementation of COGS-Well’s features in each brand.
Rolling Out COGS-Well, One Phase at a Time
Like many large restaurant groups, Lettuce Entertain You operates multiple brands.
As Dan explained, “While there are many systems that are implemented across all Lettuce restaurants, each brand does have autonomy to adopt tools and processes that best support their specific operations.”
Before COGS-Well, inventory counts, ordering, recipes, and prep at Beatrix relied heavily on spreadsheets – a tool that worked but required constant manual effort and upkeep.
Now, Beatrix does daily counts by storage locations. They also use COGS-Well to suggest what items and quantities to order and prepare each day. Beatrix’s recipes and menu items now always reflect the most current ingredient costs.
“We started with inventory counts and recipes. Then, we moved into doing prep lists at each location. And then we started doing our ordering."
Supporting Both Restaurants and Markets at Scale
Operationally, Beatrix itself is relatively straightforward – five locations, the same menu, and similar processes. But within the Beatrix brand, there is another layer of complexity: Beatrix Market.
“Beatrix Market is a whole different ballgame,” Dan said. “There are nearly 800 prep recipes and about 3,000 Toast SKUs that came through to COGS-Well.”
Managing that level of complexity requires strong systems and someone willing to own the execution.
“I’m taking on the majority of the work on the backend and then try to make it as easy as possible for the day-to-day team.”
Simplifying Orders Across Multiple Vendors
Ordering was one of the biggest operational wins for Dan’s team. For Beatrix, ordering involves a mix of vendors – including Sysco, Midwest Foods, bakeries, and seafood suppliers – with frequent price changes and overlapping products.
“We do a lot of price shopping between many vendors for similar items,” Dan said. “The vendors we order from for certain products changes pretty frequently based on cost.”
COGS-Well supports EDI ordering, which gives the team access to current pricing rather than relying on historical receipt data. It has also streamlined the process by automatically sending finalized orders to vendors.
Dan's locations use COGS-Well’s ordering feature to suggest which vendor to order from and what quantities to order. COGS-Well suggests the vendor based on the best price, and the amount to order based on the quantity on hand and projected usage.
On the day-to-day side, Dan shared that one of the most significant benefits of using COGS-Well’s ordering has been the time savings, accuracy, and simplicity.
"We used to make calls, send emails, or go to individual vendor portals to place orders. Now, it's kind of a one-stop shop. You enter your orders for all items and vendors in one place, hit a button, and it gets sent to everybody."
COGS-Well also has a built-in feature that enables divisional leaders like Dan to control which items or vendors are being ordered from.
“Rather than giving our stores free rein to order whatever, we can limit the items,” Dan shared. “It’s really helped with quality consistency.”
"We used to make calls, send emails, or go to individual vendor portals to place orders. Now, it's kind of a one-stop shop.
From Complex Spreadsheets to Suggested Prep
Prep planning was another area where Dan’s team saw immediate improvement.
Before COGS-Well, prep decisions were made using Excel spreadsheets that tracked on-hand counts and historical usage.
“We would count what we had on hand every night, then we would make the call in the morning for what we wanted to prep for the day,” Dan said. "It was a complex spreadsheet with all sorts of formulas."
Now, the team runs prep worksheets and uses COGS-Well’s suggested prep, which factors in on-hand inventory, projected usage, shelf life, and the days to prep for – without requiring chefs to do the math themselves.
“For the restaurants that have a consistent menu and don’t change frequently, the prep features have worked out really well," Dan shared.
Recipe Management and Menu Modeling
Recipes play a critical role in keeping food costs on target – and they’re something Dan continually stays on top of so he can support the kitchen.
“I constantly have chefs reaching out like, ‘Hey, what’s the cost of this item?’”
By tying ingredients directly to menu items, the team can model pricing, cost percentages, and gross profit (menu modeling). When asked if they use COGS-Well to price menu items, Dan’s answer was clear.
“100%. That’s how we get the food cost percentage, and we use this feature extensively. Just even today, we were adding a side, and the chef reached out to me to ask the price on a side of toasted butter and jam so he could understand the potential costs associated.”
Invoice Tracking and Reporting That Drives Decision-Making
Reporting has been one of the most impactful benefits of COGS-Well for Dan’s team – especially the receiving reports that track and analyze inventory purchases.
With accurate purchase and usage data, the team can have more informed conversations with vendors.
“We can see our purchases for the year and talk to our vendors about contract pricing,” Dan explained. “We’ve been able to secure some really good contracts.”
Beatrix also uses a COGS-Well product called Invoice+, an invoice scanning and uploading solution that streamlines invoice processing without overhauling established workflows.
Once invoices are uploaded, they automatically update COGS-Well’s receiving data, including the items, quantities, packaging, vendor, and cost. For any new items, COGS-Well automatically assigns count and recipe units to the items so they can be counted or used in recipes right away.
A Support Team That Feels Like a Partner
Behind all of it is COGS-Well’s support team – a team that Dan has become very familiar with.
“The support service has been great, and they’ve been very responsive,” he said. “I’ve asked a myriad of questions, some of them very simple and mundane, some of them a little more complex.”
That consultative approach, paired with thoughtful product development, has made it easier for Dan’s division to adopt COGS-Well without disrupting established processes.
The flexibility of how features can be implemented, along with COGS-Well’s willingness to make product customizations, is core to the company's philosophy. As COGS-Well Co-Founder Dave Douglas shared, “We don’t want to ask our customers to change their operation to fit our product, but rather we want our product to fit their operations.”