FoodNormIQ calculates normative food costs with yield-adjusted, shrinkage-adjusted, labor-loaded precision. For any restaurant. Any POS. Any scale.
Most restaurants track food cost as a % on the P&L. By the time you see it, the money is already gone. The real question is: what SHOULD each recipe cost?
Costs are outdated the day you enter them. When salmon goes up 12%, you don't know until the monthly P&L — 4-6 weeks later.
A "30% food cost" on the P&L doesn't tell you which dishes are profitable and which are bleeding. Averages hide the extremes.
You buy 10 lbs of salmon at $5/lb. After trimming, portioning, and cooking shrinkage, you have 7.2 lbs of usable product. Your real cost is $6.94/lb — not $5.
Avocado goes up 18%. It affects your guac, your avocado toast, your Southwest bowl, and 4 other recipes. Did you catch all of them? Probably not.
"Should I raise the price on the salmon?" Without knowing the exact cost, yield, and margin, you're guessing. Guessing costs restaurants 3-5% of revenue.
You sold 200 salmon bowls this week. You should have used 125 lbs. You actually used 160 lbs. That's 35 lbs of waste — $175/week, $9,100/year — from one item.
You provide the recipes. We provide the math. Precision costs nothing but attention.
Add ingredients, quantities, and cooking methods. Or upload existing recipe docs — we'll digitize them. USDA yield defaults pre-loaded.
Upload vendor invoices (we scan them automatically), enter prices manually, or connect your purchasing system. Prices auto-update across all recipes.
Upload POS sales data (CSV/Excel) or connect your POS. We match what you sold against what each recipe should have cost.
See normative cost per recipe, menu engineering matrix, what-if scenarios, and theoretical vs actual analysis. Updated daily.
Each module builds on the last. Start with recipe costing. Grow into full menu intelligence.
True cost per recipe adjusted for yield loss, cooking shrinkage, and prep waste. USDA-backed defaults with manual override. Sub-recipe trees cascade automatically.
Scan invoices with AI (Azure Document Intelligence) or enter manually. Track price trends per ingredient per vendor. Get alerts when prices spike beyond thresholds.
Every dish classified as Star, Workhorse, Puzzle, or Dog based on sales volume × margin. Know exactly which items to promote, reprice, reposition, or remove.
Change any input — ingredient price, portion size, cooking method — and instantly see the impact on recipe cost, margin, and profitability. Model menu changes before committing.
Compare what you SHOULD have used (based on recipes × sales) against what you ACTUALLY used (based on purchases/inventory). The gap = waste + theft + portioning drift.
Your salmon doesn't just cost ingredients — it costs 12 minutes of prep at $18/hr. FoodNormIQ calculates the full labor-loaded cost per recipe, revealing the true "cost per kitchen minute."
Spreadsheets gave you a starting point. FoodNormIQ gives you the destination.
| Capability | Spreadsheets / Manual | FoodNormIQ |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe Costing | Static. Outdated within days. | Live. Updates when any price changes. |
| Yield Adjustment | Rarely calculated. Assumed 100%. | USDA defaults + custom overrides. Cascading. |
| Cooking Shrinkage | Ignored entirely. | Per method (grill, roast, fry) with actual %. |
| Price Changes | Manual find-and-replace across sheets. | Auto-cascade: 1 price update → all recipes recalculate. |
| Menu Engineering | Separate analysis. Usually quarterly. | Always-on. Star/Workhorse/Puzzle/Dog live. |
| Theoretical vs Actual | Massive manual effort. Rarely done. | Automatic. Connect POS + invoices = daily AvT. |
| What-If Scenarios | Build new spreadsheet per scenario. | Instant. Change any input, see cascading impact. |
Explore recipe costing, menu engineering, what-if scenarios, and more — with realistic restaurant data.
No login required. 12 recipes, real yields, live what-if.
Whether you run 1 restaurant or 50, your recipes determine your margins.
"I need to know if my new dish is profitable BEFORE it goes on the menu. FoodNormIQ lets me model costs, yields, and margins in minutes instead of hours with spreadsheets."
"I can finally see which dishes make money and which don't. The what-if simulator saved me from a $40K pricing mistake on our new spring menu."
"Theoretical vs actual food cost is the metric I've always wanted. Now I can see exactly where waste is happening — by location, by week, by ingredient."
Any POS that can export sales data as CSV or Excel. This includes Toast, Square, Clover, Aloha, Revel, and dozens more. We also support manual sales entry for restaurants without electronic POS exports.
Three ways: type them in directly (our interface is built for chefs), upload existing recipe documents (PDF, Word, Excel — we digitize them using AI), or import from recipe management tools you already use.
Upload vendor invoices (photo or PDF — AI extracts line items automatically), enter prices manually, or connect your purchasing system. When a price changes, every recipe using that ingredient recalculates instantly.
A normative cost is the TRUE cost of a recipe after accounting for yield loss (trimming, peeling), cooking shrinkage (grilling, roasting, frying), and prep waste. Most restaurants only track raw ingredient cost — normative costing reveals the real picture.
USDA yield factors are industry-standard and pre-loaded for 800+ common ingredients. They're accurate for most operations but fully adjustable — if your butcher trims differently or your chef portions differently, override the defaults.
We offer plans based on the number of recipes and locations. Request a demo and we'll walk you through the options that fit your operation.
Request a demo and we'll show you FoodNormIQ with recipes that match your menu — your ingredients, your portions, your cooking methods.
We'll reach out within 24 hours to schedule a walkthrough.