Restaurant owners: you are literally giving money away with each order

Most restaurant owners are not losing money because of low demand.
They are losing money because they do not know what an order is supposed to cost them.

That single blind spot is enough to destroy profitability — even in busy restaurants.

If you don’t know, before an order is placed, how much money it should leave you with, you are gambling. And you are gambling dozens, sometimes hundreds of times per day.

The real problem: you price without knowing the outcome

Most menus are priced using one of these methods:

• “What competitors charge”
• “What feels acceptable to customers”
• “What we’ve always charged”
• “What delivery platforms suggest”

None of these methods answer the only question that matters:

After this order is completed, how much money is left?

If you can’t answer that clearly, pricing is disconnected from reality.

Every order repeats the same mistake

Here’s what actually happens in most restaurants:

• A dish is slightly underpriced
• Portions drift by a few grams
• Packaging costs are ignored
• Delivery commissions are treated as a general expense

Individually, these don’t look dramatic.

But every order repeats the same error.

A dish that loses a small amount doesn’t feel dangerous — until it’s sold 300 times per week. At that point, the restaurant isn’t “busy”. It’s actively financing its own losses.

Food cost percentages are lying to you

Food cost percentage is one of the most misleading metrics in restaurants.

You can hit a “good” food cost percentage and still be losing money because:

• it averages profitable and unprofitable items
• it hides portioning problems
• it doesn’t show which dishes are dangerous
• it ignores channel-specific costs

What matters is food usage per item, not global percentages.

A single dish with bad economics can erase the profit of five good ones.

If you don’t know theoretical usage, you don’t have control

Every dish should have a theoretical cost.

Not “around”.
Not “more or less”.

A real number.

If a dish should consume 180g of chicken, and you never check whether that actually happens, then:

• waste
• over-portioning
• prep loss
• staff habits

are invisible.

When reality deviates from theory and you don’t measure it, you are paying for mistakes you don’t even see.

Delivery is where money disappears fastest

Delivery amplifies every pricing mistake.

The same dish sold in-house and on delivery is not the same product.

Delivery adds:

• platform commissions
• payment fees
• packaging
• operational friction

If you don’t price per channel, you are subsidizing delivery sales with dine-in margins.

Many restaurants think delivery “helps cash flow”. In reality, it often accelerates losses.

Busy does not mean profitable

Some of the most financially stressed restaurants are the busiest ones.

Why?

Because volume multiplies bad economics.

More orders don’t fix a broken model. They make the damage happen faster.

The hardest truth for restaurant owners to accept is this:
You can work extremely hard and still lose money efficiently.

What to do instead

If you want to stop giving money away, start here:

1. Know what each dish should cost
   Not globally. Per item.
2. Compare theoretical vs actual usage regularly
   This is where 80% of losses hide.
3. Price per channel, not per menu
   Delivery is a different business.
4. Identify dangerous dishes
   High sales does not mean healthy.
5. Stop relying on intuition
   Intuition feels good. Data keeps restaurants alive.

These steps are uncomfortable because they expose reality.
But avoiding them doesn’t make the problem disappear — it just delays the moment it explodes.

Stop guessing with every order

Every order should be a controlled decision, not a hope.

If you don’t clearly see what an order earns you, you are paying for uncertainty with your own money.

That’s exactly what Kyze was built to fix.

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See exactly where money is lost on each order — and what to fix first.

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