What do you multiply your cost price by to hit your GP? For 72% GP, it's 4.29.

Your supplier has just put 18p on the cost of your burger. Absorb it, and it costs you £3,240 a year.

"Let's give away £4,212 this year." Nobody stands at the pass and decides this, and yet it happens every day. Not through theft, not through waste, tot because anybody is trying to do a bad job. It happens because a scoop is a little too full. The chef plates what looks right rather than what the specification says. Thirty grams here, twenty grams there. Service after service. Day after day.

"Let's spend an extra £7,000 a year on food purchases" Nobody ever sits in a management meeting and says that. And yet it happens all the time, not because somebody makes a reckless decision, approves a higher budget or deliberately chooses higher costs. It happens because convenience slowly becomes the purchasing strategy.

A chef sent over his dish costs and GP calculations for a menu engineering report I was putting together. One steak dish was showing a GP of 75.7%. That immediately raised an eyebrow. For the selling price involved, the margin looked unusually strong. When I checked how he'd worked it out, I found the problem straight away: he'd left VAT in the selling price. Removing the VAT element brought the revenue down from £24.00 to £20.00 ex-VAT and the GP down to 70.9%.

Get cask setup and conditioning wrong and you start a quality spiral: worse beer, fewer sales, longer on the bar, worse beer still. Here's how to get it right instead.

The drip tray behind your bar can cost you £20k a year in wasted beer. Here's the formula to calculate your own loss, and the fixes that stop it.

Cask ale is a living product. Once it’s tapped and vented, it’s exposed to air, and from that point it’s on a countdown. For the session-strength beers that make up the vast majority of cask lines, that countdown is measured in days, not weeks.

The first two posts in this series covered the financial reality of draught beer loss and the nine system failures that drive it. This one is about the human side, and specifically why inconsistent pour technique is a management problem before it’s a training problem.

In the last post I put a number on draught beer loss: £27,000 a year for a ten-tap venue losing 1.5 pints per tap per day. If that landed, the obvious question is where it’s actually coming from. The answer, in most venues, is the system. Not the people behind the bar. The infrastructure they’re working with. Here are the nine places to look.

Draught beer should be one of the most profitable lines on your P&L. The margins are there. The volume is there. Customers order it all night without prompting. So why are so many operators pouring a significant chunk of that profit straight down the drain?

You've got two minutes. That's how long the average customer spends looking at a menu before they order. Two minutes to influence what they choose, how much they spend, and whether your kitchen runs efficiently or spins its wheels on dishes that cost more than they return. Menu engineering is the process of making those two minutes work for you. Done properly, it can increase profitability by up to 15%. Done badly, or not done at all, it leaves serious money on the table.

UK restaurants are running on margins of 4–7%. Independents often sit at the lower end. In that environment, there is very little room for losses that could be avoided. Food waste is one of them.

This project involved the turnaround of a 120-seat, high-volume restaurant delivering approximately 500 covers per day, alongside an extremely busy late-night bar operation. Despite strong revenues, the business was experiencing significant profitability issues, with the bar alone losing approximately £10,000 per month at retail value.