01
~2–4% of spend
Vendor price drift
Quiet, invoice-by-invoice creep. Eight percent on chicken this week. Three percent on cream the week before. Nobody flagged either one.
Kitchen Counts is comprehensive inventory management software that installs operational ownership around food cost control: a one-month on-site build, your team trained to run weekly inventory counts, vendor monitoring, variance analysis, and reporting, backed by speech-to-text agentic diagnostics and a library of Procedures, Routines, and Training documents, then bi-weekly or monthly QA from us. Your kitchen team stays focused on the work that requires their attention.
Kitchen Counts is built around four operational pillars: the Cost Driver Index, Smart Ordering, vendor price monitoring, and behavioural coaching, applied weekly in a rhythm that respects how kitchens actually run. The deliverable is a Thursday Report in your inbox, by 5pm, every week.
The Method
Built from real kitchens.
Kitchen Counts was forged in high-stress, high-level kitchens, the kind where the pass never waits. Years on the line taught me what actually keeps food cost in line, and just as clearly, where most operators and the systems they buy fall down: the weekly count that never quite happens, and the software nobody ends up running. Kitchen Counts is what holds that discipline every week, without putting another job on your team.
Weekly counts14-day setupTeam-run countsThursday Report by 5pm
$500K+Aggregate food cost impact and revenue created across operations
14 daysFrom signed engagement to first Thursday Report
0 loginsYour team operates a kitchen, not a dashboard
Thursday 5pmEvery report, every week, on time
The Method
Four operational pillars.One weekly rhythm.
Everything Kitchen Counts does sits on four practices institutional kitchens have always needed but rarely had the bandwidth to run every week. Kitchen Counts is that bandwidth. Three of them are about the numbers. The fourth is about the people, because the numbers don't change until the people do, and the people who run your kitchen are the ones worth protecting.
01 · What we count
Cost Driver Index
The 20% of items that drive 80% of your variance. Proteins, dairy, high-volume produce, therapeutic supplements, beverage program SKUs depending on your operation. We build the index in week one, count weekly, and adjust quarterly as your menu and procurement evolves. The index shows us where to look; the shift it drives in how your team treats inventory, week after week, is what actually moves the needle.
02 · How much we order
Smart Ordering
Smart ordering sets perishability-aware par levels for what spoils, and forward-buys for what doesn't. Non-perishables get sized against real holding cost and demand, not gut feel: no over-buying because someone thinks it will be busy, no under-ordering because someone played it safe. It also flags when a quantity discount or a bulk buy is genuinely worth taking, so you capture the savings without tying up cash or filling the shelf. Less waste in the bin, and a margin that holds up over the long run. The ordering stays disciplined whether or not the person who used to just know it is on shift.
03 · What we watch
Vendor Price Monitoring
Live monitoring of every invoice against your four-week baseline price for each SKU. Anything that drifts past five percent gets flagged in the same-week Thursday Report. Vendor consolidation opportunities surface monthly. This pillar catches the slow, invoice-by-invoice price creep that quietly eats two to four percent of food spend per quarter.
04 · How the team gets better
Behavioural Coaching
Inventory discipline isn't a tooling problem; it's a behavioural one. The weekly workshop is where the data becomes a practice. We don't lecture; we surface the variance, ask the chef what they think happened, and help the team adjust prep technique, portion control, or ordering cadence. Over a 12-month engagement, the discipline becomes the team's default rather than something we impose.
The Deliverable
The Thursday Report.Two pages.
Every Thursday by 5pm, a two-page report lands in your inbox: a focused brief written for the operator, not a dashboard you log into or a 40-page export. It's structured so you can forward it to the committee or board if you need to.
1
The four numbers that matter.
Food cost percentage, weekly spend, variance against par, vendor flags. Page one's top line. Anything else on page one is either context for those four numbers or the week's narrative.
2
The 3–5 items worth your attention.
The specific SKUs, vendor flags, or prep issues that earned your read this week, capped at the handful that matter rather than a 47-alert dump or a "view all" link. If we don't have 3-5 things worth flagging, page two is shorter. That beats padding the report.
3
Operator-readable, committee-forwardable.
Plain language. No jargon. The Regional Director can forward this to the VP of Operations without re-translating. The Food Service Director can excerpt it directly into the quarterly committee brief. The chef-owner can read it in two minutes between services.
Why We Do This
Six places themoney goes.
The four pillars exist because food cost leakage doesn't have one cause. It has six. Each cause is small individually. Aggregated, they're the 6 to 15 percent most operators leak without seeing. Kitchen Counts tracks all six.
02
~1–3% of spend
Inventory variance
What you bought versus what's on the shelf. Counted weekly, reconciled by the Thursday Report. The gap between the two is where the margin sits.
03
~1–2% of spend
Portion inconsistency
The eight-ounce portion that's actually nine and a half. Multiplied across two hundred meals a week. In LTC, the deviation hides inside the resident envelope.
04
~1–3% of spend
Waste and spoilage
Over-ordering, bad rotation, prep done blind to next week's cycle menu. Counted in trim, counted in bins.
05
~1–2% of spend
Contract drift
Your bulk pricing hasn't been re-quoted since last summer. Your therapeutic supplements moved suppliers six months ago and nobody renegotiated.
06
~0.5–1% of spend
Mis-keys and shrinkage
Receiving errors. Invoices not reconciled to deliveries. The drift you find at month-end and can't trace back to a source.
Aggregate, this is the 6–15% most operators leak without seeing. On $500K of annual food spend, that's $30K to $75K. Implementation costs $15,000 up front. The math, charitably and uncharitably, is on the table.
† The percentage ranges above are operator-interview estimates and secondary industry research, not published benchmarks. How we derived them →
Questions
Questions about how thesystem actually runs.
The operational questions we get on walkthrough calls. If something here isn't covered, ask on the call; we don't have a script.
14 days from signed engagement to first Thursday Report. Week one is the on-site setup visit: count walkthrough with your chef, par-setting on the Cost Driver Index, vendor baseline pulls, integration with whatever procurement system you use. Week two is the first live count cycle. Thursday of week two, the first report lands.
Across the week your Ownership Principal runs the count, reconciles variance against par, reviews vendor flags, and monitors pricing as it moves. The Thursday Report lands by 5pm, a day before the week closes so you can act on it. Every engagement includes a weekly 30-minute team inventory and COGS workshop with your chef.
That conversation happens on the walkthrough call. Most chefs welcome a layer of operational support that doesn't second-guess their cooking: we're not menu engineers and we don't critique the food. We count, we analyse, and we report on what we find. The workshop is collaborative, not corrective. On-site presence is the one-month build itself, not a standing weekly commitment; once your Ownership Principal is trained and certified, we step back to license and QA.
Yes. We integrate with most major POS systems (Toast, Square, Lightspeed, Aloha), procurement tools (MarketMan, BlueCart, GFS Express), and accounting systems (QuickBooks, Sage, NetSuite). Where direct integration isn't available, we work from your existing exports or invoices. We don't require a software integration; many engagements run on simple spreadsheets and direct vendor invoices.
You've seen how it works.
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