Margin never drops all at once. It erodes line by line, category by category — and it's that erosion you have to learn to read, month after month, before touching a single price or supplier.
What if the margin leak finally had a name?
Two ratios are enough to tell a real leak from ordinary cash-flow noise.
Name my real leakFood cost and labour cost together account for 60 to 72% of revenue in a restaurant that holds up. Beyond that, margin inevitably leaks. But the diagnosis doesn't start with the total — it starts with knowing which of the two moved. A food-cost drift and a labour drift tell different stories, and the lever isn't in the same kitchen. Pull twelve rolling months and plot the two curves separately, month by month.
If both ratios rise at the same time, look at volumes: it's often a mechanical effect of fewer covers, not a structural drift. As shown in Read the room, a dip in footfall hits the labour ratio first — the team stays, revenue falls.
Overall margin is a misleading aggregate. Starters, mains, desserts, drinks — each has its own margin, and it's rarely the same block that carries profitability. On most menus, drinks (wines, soft drinks, coffee) hold a disproportionate share of the real margin. When the overall margin slips, first check which of the four categories is dropping. A margin drop on drinks and a margin drop on mains aren't diagnosed the same way.
Cross-reference for each dish: real food cost, selling price, volume sold. The margin-destroying dish is almost never the one instinct points to. Often it's a dish at 40% food cost that sells huge volumes — its volume amplifies a poor unit margin. Sometimes it's a dish with a beautiful unit margin that simply doesn't sell — it takes up a menu line without contributing anything. The raw table, with no interpretation, reveals both profiles.
When a popular dish concentrates the margin destruction, also look at how much of its sales go through delivery platforms — the commission eats further into unit margin, and the diagnosis moves closer to Measure the platforms than to a menu question.
Waste is margin already paid for, heading straight to the bin. Weigh or count it over two weeks: what comes back from the dining room (unfinished plates), what gets tossed during prep, what expires in stock. Three to five percent of revenue often goes out this way without ever being logged. The diagnosis doesn't call for an industrial setup — just two weeks of quiet counting to know whether the leak is here or somewhere else.
If plate returns always involve the same dish, it isn't a waste question — it's a signal about portion, cooking or how the dish is composed. Treat it as a menu signal, not a cost signal.
Sector benchmarks ("30% food cost in a bistro") hide enormous variance between venues. The right reference is you, twelve months back, on the same calendar month. If your food cost ratio was at 29% last March and it's at 33% this March, the 4-point gap is something you can act on. If you compare against a benchmark, you reassure or alarm yourself without learning anything about your own drift.
The diagnosis is yours, ReadyToPost drives the visibility.
You read your two ratios every month; ReadyToPost writes the posts that sell your profitable dishes without a thought.
Drive my visibilityDo
Don't
Situation
A bistronomy restaurant notices its gross margin down 3 points over six months. The owner's first instinct: renegotiate the meat supplier, the line that weighs most in absolute value.
Action
Before picking up the phone, he breaks it down. The food cost ratio moved from 30% to 31%, marginally. The labour ratio, though, went from 36% to 39% — three points in six months, with no new hires. He cross-checks against the schedules: evening-service overtime has doubled to cover the turnover of two front-of-house roles. The leak wasn't in purchasing, it was in the stability of the team — something to dig into via Track the team.
Outcome
The diagnosis wasn't a food cost problem but a payroll figure quietly drifting. A supplier renegotiation would have clawed back 0.5 points of margin — the real cause was worth six times that. The menu didn't change, neither did the prices. The real lever sat outside the purchasing side of the P&L.
The real culprit wasn't the meat, it was the team.
Renegotiating a supplier would have saved half a point; the real cause was worth six times more.
When covers drop and fixed costs stay, the food cost ratio rises mechanically even if nothing changed on the purchasing side. Reading a ratio as a percentage without looking at absolute volume means mistaking a footfall problem for a food cost problem. Two opposite diagnoses, two opposite levers.
One month of degraded food cost after a miscounted inventory, or a week of heavy spoilage on a fresh product, gives you a data point that looks alarming. A trend is three consecutive months minimum, compared to the same period a year earlier. Rushing to diagnose leads to structural decisions built on simple accounting noise.
The supplier that weighs most in absolute value isn't necessarily the one whose margin is leaking. Many leaks hide in the small lines — dry goods, wines by the glass, coffee, garnishes — where nobody looks because the amounts seem negligible individually. Added up over the year, they often weigh more than a point negotiated on the main line.
You've just identified where it's breaking. Addressing it will take your time, your focus, your energy. Meanwhile, your communication can't go dark — or turn into filler. Readytopost keeps it at a demanding level on the five social networks: posts written, images generated, calendar filled — calibrated on your work.
Start with ReadyToPostKeep going on your own. The method for restaurants lays out the principles that turn a diagnosis into durable action — across every lever, not just communication. Concrete markers to help you decide on the fly, without imposed recipes or rigid calendars. At your pace, at your scale.
Continue to the method
There is no universal number. A bistro runs around 28-32%, a fine-dining spot can climb to 35-38% with premium ingredients, a fast-casual sits at 25-28%. More useful than any benchmark: your own ratio over a rolling twelve months, month by month. A drift of 2 to 4 points against your own history is a signal worth acting on. The reference isn't your sector, it's you.
Three readings to make before drawing any conclusion. Either the food cost ratio has crept up (supplier inflation not passed on, portion drift, rising waste). Or the labour ratio has climbed (overtime, cover shifts, invisible turnover). Or your margin by category has shifted — you're selling the same volume, but the product mix has tilted toward lower-margin dishes. A stable overall margin often hides a mix that's quietly drifting.
The distinction shows up when you cross two readings. If the food cost ratio rises on dishes whose theoretical food cost is stable, the leak is operational (waste, portions, theft, faulty inventories). If it rises because high-food-cost dishes are taking a growing share of sales, it's the menu mix that's drifting — typically when a popular but barely profitable dish soaks up sales at the expense of higher-margin plates.
The diagnosis doesn't tell you how often to act, it tells you how often to read. Reviewing prices belongs to method, not diagnosis. On the reading side: a monthly check on your ratios and a quarterly check on margin per dish are enough to catch a drift before it settles in. Reacting to every monthly figure is overreacting. Ignoring it for a year is letting the leak take root.
Before renegotiating anything, lay out the breakdown. If the drift comes from the labour ratio, the product mix or waste, squeezing a supplier doesn't touch the cause. And even if the leak really is in food cost, your biggest supplier by absolute value isn't always the one whose costs have drifted the most. The small lines (dry goods, wines, coffee, garnishes) often carry most of the gap, with nobody ever looking at them.
Instagram story dimensions are 1080 x 1920 pixels, a 9:16 vertical frame. What nobody writes down is that Instagram lays its own interface over roughly 250 pixels at the top and the bottom of that frame. This guide reads a restaurant's last stories against four failure modes, padded, cropped, covered, soft, and names the single cause behind each one.
Instagram post dimensions take one line to state and a whole service to get wrong. Portrait 1080 x 1350, square 1080 x 1080, story 1080 x 1920 — and one framing habit that lets a single shot survive all three.
The Instagram post size that shows a restaurant photo largest in the feed is 4:5 portrait, 1080 x 1350 pixels. One size for the dish, one for the room, one for the daily special, set once on your phone, and no more re-cropping.
Agency retainer, freelancer batch, or software that writes the week from your site. What each delivers for a small business, what it costs, and the three decisions behind the one we built.
Chris Burkard’s account shows how a clear photographic territory makes a feed easy to understand. Use that principle to turn each client shoot into a coherent series of posts.
Five current guides repeat the same useful pattern: clarify what you make, show more than the finished piece, explain the work, and keep a clear next step.
From a single website URL, ReadyToPost builds your brand profile and starts generating on-brand posts — no manual brief to fill.
Create AI product images and social media visuals from your photos or from scratch. ReadyToPost applies your brand style in the right format for each network.
A semantic memory of your brand's real facts, so every post cites what you actually do and have.
Generate on-brand Instagram posts where the 4:5 feed visual and the caption are built together — a scroll-stopping hook, breathable paragraphs, and full-word hashtags grouped at the end, scheduled and ready to publish.
ReadyToPost prepares LinkedIn posts in your voice every week. Review and approve your content, then publish to your profile or company page on schedule.
ReadyToPost prepares Facebook images and posts in your voice every week. Review and approve them, then schedule publication to your Facebook Page.
You know where to look. While you address it, Readytopost keeps your communication alive — written, illustrated and scheduled every week.
Monthly plansReady in minutesCancel in one click
