Gaining Insights: Turning Restaurant Data into Action

In today's world of slim margins and ever-changing costs, you need added insights to stay ahead of the game. Have your food costs been rising? Are you losing dollars because of undetected ingredient cost changes, waste, underperforming menu items, or over-portioning, without realizing it?  

Without a restaurant inventory, recipe, and cost management system like COGS-Well by your side, these insights are hard, if not impossible, to gain. Let's explore what the right system can do for your bottom line. 

Purchase History and Cost Visibility 

If you’re like most operators, you already place orders, receive invoices, and cost out your recipes. What if performing these simple tasks gave you significantly more insight into your operations?  

An inventory system will give you clear insight into every purchase you make. All it takes is scanning your invoices or an EDI integration with your vendors. From there, you will instantly know what you bought, how much you paid, when you bought it, and from which supplier, whether you want to see the last invoice or a consolidation for a month, or the entire year. 

But the real advantage is being instantly alerted to a significant cost increase or seeing how the cost of items trends over time. You’ll catch it if your halibut invoice suddenly spikes, or if it quietly rises 10% over the last quarter. No more being blindsided by supplier price hikes or scrambling to reconcile surprises in your P&L later. 

“We just brought in Alaskan halibut, and we're about to have a season for local sea bass. The price of Maine lobsters is really high this time of year. Same with artichokes and asparagus. COGS-Well allows us to monitor and react to everything.” - Peyton Strait, Director of Procurement, Lure Fish House 

Suggested Ordering: Know What to Buy Before You Run Out 

Ordering the right amount of your inventory items is one of the biggest headaches in the business, especially if your team is guessing based on what they think is left in the walk-in or how much they will need for the next few days. Suggested ordering takes out the guesswork. 

By comparing what’s on hand to your par levels and projecting what you’ll need before the next delivery, you get smarter, easier ordering that leads to optimal inventory levels. No more over-ordering and tossing spoiled food. No more running out of items in the middle of a rush and before the next delivery.  

And if you utilize a system like COGS-Well to take inventory counts regularly, you will unlock even deeper insights: real inventory item usage and actual cost of goods sold. When you track what you really use, not just what you bought, you can make smarter, profit-driven purchasing decisions every period. 

“Our waste number significantly decreased as a whole because we were able to tackle our waste with the suggested ordering feature in COGS-Well. We're talking thousands of dollars every period.” - Emir Aydin, Director of Operations, Impact Kitchen 

Recipe Management and Menu Engineering: Make Every Plate Profitable 

Intuitive inventory management systems make it easy to cost out your recipes and menu items, increasing efficiency and profitability. Even better, once you create the recipes, the ingredient costs stay up to date automatically. You can also set targets for cost percentages or profit, so your restaurant team is all working toward clear, shared goals. 

Another benefit of inventory-focused restaurant systems is the ability to leverage Menu Engineering – or the ability to evaluate your menu items based on their popularity and profitability. You'll be able to pinpoint your Stars (popular and profitable) and modify or phase out your Dogs (unpopular and unprofitable). 

“Since day one, we have been using the menu engineering reports quarterly. Before COG-Well, we had to handle this internally with a spreadsheet we created, but there was a lot of labor required to maintain it, and it was prone to errors.” - Emir Aydin, Director of Operations, Impact Kitchen 

“COGS-Well helps us make educated menu decisions on what we're going to remove or replace. We use the menu engineering report to see if we have any problem children.” - Peyton Strait, Director of Procurement, Lure Fish House 

Variance Tracking: See the Gaps Before They Cost You 

Without inventory management tools, tracking variances is nearly impossible. Systems like COGS-Well calculate what your cost of sales and inventory usage should be, so you can compare those numbers to your actuals and isolate variances. 

Why does this matter? Because small, unexplained differences add up fast. Lost inventory, over-portioning, unreported waste – these can quietly chip away at your profit if you don’t catch them. 

With cost of sales and item-level variances calculated automatically, you can quickly see where the problems are - which ingredients are off, which locations are slipping, or where additional training might be needed. Instead of suspecting something is wrong, you will know where you have problems and how to fix them.  

“You can have a location struggling with control of their portioning. By doing daily counts and comparing those to a calculated on-hand, you can pinpoint what days those issues are happening. Then we can look at our schedules, see who was working, and go back and retrain.” - Jeremy Lanni, Director of Catering, Events, Fundraisers & Partnerships, &pizza 

“Our finance team has been able to look at inventory variances for all our restaurants based on the invoices coming in and let one know when something is off. We can see anything that might skew the reporting.” - Linda Liu, Manager, Finance & Accounting, Impact Kitchen 

Bringing It All Together: Restaurant Insights That Drive Growth 

Building your restaurant tech stack is about investing in tools that enable you to make better, more timely decisions. When you gain deeper insights into purchasing, recipe costs, menu performance, and variances, you’re no longer guessing and operating with clarity. 

Systems like COGS-Well make these insights easy and automatic. No extra work, no manual number-crunching. Just the data you need to make your restaurant smarter, faster, and more profitable. 

“COGS-Well has been extremely wonderful. It's very accurate, with so much less manual work or manipulation.” - Linda Liu, Manager, Finance & Accounting, Impact Kitchen