Food Cost: Why Cafes in Georgia Are Losing Money Right in the Kitchen

In most small cafes and restaurants in Georgia, food cost is not calculated at all or is estimated once a month by guesswork. Many write this off as a natural part of running a newly opened place. However, without a system in place, a venue begins to lose money from its very first day of operation, and over time the problem only worsens: the owner sees a full house and stable revenue but fails to understand why there is no net profit.

What a Kitchen Should Ideally Spend

For the Georgian market, normal food cost benchmarks look as follows:

• 25–35% of revenue — a healthy indicator for a successful cafe.
• Above 40% — a critical zone. The kitchen is operating at a loss, even if the dining room is full.

Three Main Sources of Losses Where Money Disappears

If a venue lacks systematic tracking, inventory and cash guaranteed vanish in three directions:

• Portions Without a Defined Standard A chef plates a dish based on what feels right in the moment. Today they put 180 grams of meat into a portion, and tomorrow — 220 grams. On a single plate, the difference seems negligible, but with average guest traffic, those 40 grams turn into thousands of lost lari per year.
• Waste Without Record A sauce spoils, a soup overcooks, or a waiter drops a plate — and all of it quietly goes into the trash bin. Without logging these losses, it is impossible to understand where the actual loophole lies: whether the kitchen staff is sloppy, storage conditions are wrong, or the supplier is delivering defective goods.
• Purchasing Without Sales Analysis Ingredients are ordered simply because "we always buy this much." This approach fails to account for the fact that the previous week was a holiday peak, while this week marks a seasonal slowdown. As a result, a portion of the excess stock spoils in the warehouse.

What the Gap Looks Like in Figures

Let’s look at how food cost control affects the budget of a small cafe with monthly circulating funds of 15,000 GEL:

The difference per month is 1,950 GEL. You didn't raise prices, didn't hire new employees, and didn't increase your marketing budget — you simply brought order to the tracking of what is already in the kitchen.

How to Get Food Cost Under Control

For basic control in the kitchen, three core tools must be implemented:

1. 1Recipe Cards. A recipe for every dish, precise down to the gram. How much the prep weighs and how much goes into the finished plate. Without these cards, any tracking is just a guessing game.
2. 2Waste Logging. Everything that spoiled, burned, or was thrown away must be recorded. A log in a notebook is the bare minimum to start with.
3. 3Inventory Reconciliation Against Sales. We calculate the dishes sold through the POS, multiply them by the consumption standard from the recipe cards, and determine how much inventory should have left the warehouse. Then we compare it with actual stock. The discrepancy represents your net losses.

When the Notebook Fails to Keep Up

Tracking in notebooks only works in tiny venues with a fixed assortment where inventory consumption is easy to predict. As soon as the number of items exceeds three dozen, and weight-based dishes or orders with individual modifiers appear on the menu, manual tracking fails to keep up. Data arrives late, random mistakes inevitably accumulate during data transfer, and the calculations themselves take up too much time.

The cloud-based POS system RestaurantOS calculates food cost automatically.

• You enter the recipe cards into the system once.
• A waiter inputs the order on a tablet.
• At the moment of sale, ingredients are automatically deducted from the inventory.

The owner sees real-time stock levels and an exact food cost during the shift, and receives a ready report via Telegram in the evening.