Kitchen Counts provides a food cost control system purpose-built for independent restaurants and restaurant groups, single-site to multi-unit, chef-owned or operator-led. Our team runs weekly counts, monitors vendor pricing across the portfolio, and delivers a Thursday report to your GM or ops director.
Designed for operators who have outgrown spreadsheets but don't want to hire another head office body or subscribe to another SaaS dashboard. Built around consistency, COGS targeting against unit-level P&L, and the cross-kitchen benchmarking that makes a group operate like a group.
Multi-unit restaurant groups outgrow inventory spreadsheets fast, usually around unit three. On 3 to 5 percent margins, one or two points of food cost is $50–150K a year on a $5M group, and you keep every dollar of it. The usual next moves are a $75–120K in-house F&B controller or another inventory app that gets bought and abandoned. We built Kitchen Counts as the third option: a weekly food cost control system, built and trained into your team across all your units, sized to the group, then QA'd by us.
Weekly counts on your highest-impact cost drivers, theoretical-vs-actual variance on shared menus, vendor consolidation across the group, and a Thursday report that benchmarks unit against unit. Your chefs stay in the kitchens, and the operational layer arrives without the head-office overhead.
Independent restaurant groups hit an operational threshold somewhere between units two and four. The chef-owner can no longer be in every kitchen every week. The bookkeeper can run the numbers but can't drive the discipline. The next move is supposed to be a Director of Operations or a COO, but those hires take six months to find and $120K+ loaded to keep. Most groups defer the hire and pay for the deferral in margin instead. On thin margins, every point of food cost you give back is a point you keep when the discipline holds.
Every group eventually starts interviewing for a Director of Operations. The right candidate is rare, expensive, and often pulled away by larger groups before you close. The wrong candidate costs you a year of distraction. Most groups defer this hire two to three years past when they needed it.
Same menu, different kitchens, different variance. The location that performs at 28% food cost and the one that runs at 35% are using the same recipes, same suppliers, often the same prep lists. The drift hides in plain sight until quarter-end aggregates make it visible, and by then the cause is too far back to trace.
You’ve evaluated MarketMan, MarginEdge, BlueCart, and a half-dozen others. You’ve maybe paid for one. The dashboards looked great in the demo and went unopened by week four. The problem wasn’t the software; it was that nobody had time to operate it weekly. Tools without operators are just expenses.
Food cost looked fine in week four. By the end of Q1, it’s three points over target across the group. Somebody flags it. The conversation is about whose unit drifted, not about what to do next. The next quarter starts behind, with nobody quite knowing why.
Kitchen Counts operates on a weekly rhythm that respects how independent groups actually run. We work around your menu cycles, your chef teams' prep schedules, and your monthly P&L close, rather than the other way around.
The unsung data point of the week: did you order effectively for last weekend, and how are you shaping up for the next? Our team runs a 30-minute walkthrough and inventory count on your key cost drivers at each unit. Service doesn’t stop. The data arrives clean and unit-tagged.
Rolling Wednesday across unitsWithin a day, counts are reconciled across the group. Actual versus theoretical usage, par exceptions, vendor flags, and (uniquely for groups) unit-to-unit benchmarking on shared SKUs. The chef who runs proteins tight gets recognised. The unit drifting on dairy gets named.
Available next dayLive tracking of every invoice at every unit against the group’s four-week baseline. Anything past five percent gets flagged. Vendor consolidation opportunities surface monthly; three units buying the same SKU from three different suppliers is a contract conversation we can run on your behalf.
Continuous · all unitsThe deliverable. Lands in your inbox by 5pm Thursday. Two pages. Page one: the group-level numbers and the week’s narrative. Page two: per-unit breakouts, with the three to five items most worth your attention across the portfolio.
In your inbox by Thursday 5pmA 60-minute group-wide workshop with all your GMs together during the build month: benchmark sharing, recipe tune-ups, cross-unit problem-solving. The horizontal learning across kitchens is where multi-unit groups actually compound, and it continues quarterly once we step back to QA.
Monthly during the build, then quarterlyWeekly counts surface the variance pattern: proteins are tight everywhere, but Unit 3’s produce is running 30% over par. The Thursday Report flags the trend, the monthly workshop traces it to a prep tech who’s been over-trimming. Adjustment made in the next prep shift. Food cost back to target by week three.
The unit-level drift gets named in the same month it appeared, not at quarter-end.
Cross-group vendor monitoring surfaces the duplication on a single bottle SKU. Three GMs ordering through three sales reps, each on a different price tier. We consolidate, your group lands a 12% volume discount, and the new contract becomes your Q2 pricing baseline.
The contract conversation gets surfaced and we run it for you. Savings drop straight to the bottom line.
Unit-tagged data makes cross-kitchen analysis possible without spreadsheets. Wednesday food cost by unit, week over week, surfaces the unit running tight midweek. The team takeaway lands at the GM workshop. The high-performing unit’s prep cadence gets adopted at the others. Group margin moves a quarter-point.
The internal benchmarking that big groups have, scaled to your operation.
Typical food cost reduction within the first two quarters of the engagement, group-wide.
From signed engagement to first Thursday Report. Service built per-unit, pars set, counts running.
Director-of-Operations hires required. Kitchen Counts is the operational layer, not a head-office body.
Units covered under a single implementation. Larger groups move to portfolio pricing.
The real comparison is between three operating models groups land on at the 2-to-10-unit threshold: a cheap inventory app you operate yourself, a $75–120K in-house controller, or Kitchen Counts. What matters is what each one actually costs, and what discipline each one actually delivers, over a year.
corporate ops hire
MarketMan, MarginEdge, BlueCart, etc.
one-month install, then license & QA
Numbers vary by group size, region, and chef team structure. The walkthrough call sizes the math to your specific operation.
“The best part of any restaurant group is the people who run it, yet the whole operation often leans on a few of them carrying the counts and the orders in their heads. A system that strains and overworks your most valuable people to hold itself together isn't sustainable; it walks out the door the day they do. We focus on the counts, so you can focus on your people and your food.”
Ethan J. AllwoodFounder, Kitchen CountsRestaurants are where I built this, working the kind of nights that break people. I've stood on the line and carried the counts in my own head, and I've felt how fast it unravels when everything rides on a few people. I built Kitchen Counts because I've lived it, and I know how hard it can be.
You made it through Restaurant Operators.
Next: Facility KitchensBook a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll go through Kitchen Counts with you: your operation, your numbers, your team. No slide decks.
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