Your Best Store Already Knows What Food Cost Should Be — So Why Don't the Others?

You look at food cost across your locations every period. Maybe every week. You know which stores run tight and which ones don't.

But here's the question most multi-unit operators can't answer: is the gap between your best store and your worst store a people problem, a systems problem, or just noise?

Because until you know that, you're managing food cost the same way at every location. And that almost never works.

The Spreadsheet Tells You What — Not Why

You pull your P&L by location. Store 4 is running a 29%. Store 7 is running a 33%. You know there's a gap.

So you call the GM at Store 7. You tell them food cost is high. They say they're working on it. Maybe you send a reminder about waste logs. Maybe you do a walk-through and check portioning. Maybe you bring it up again next month when the number hasn't moved.

None of that is wrong. But none of it answers the question: why is Store 7 at 33%?

Is it because they're over-ordering and throwing product away before they use it? Is it because their kitchen team portions inconsistently and nobody's checked yield in months? Is it because their ordering pars were set up a year ago and haven't been recalibrated since the menu changed?

Each of those is a completely different problem with a completely different fix. But they all show up as the same number on the P&L.

Your Best Store Is Your Best Benchmark

Most operators compare food cost against a brand target or an industry average. Those numbers are fine for a board meeting but they don't help you run the business.

Your best store is a better benchmark — because it's operating inside your system, with your menu, your supply chain, your pricing. Whatever food cost that store runs, the others should be able to get close. If they can't, the question isn't whether they have a problem. The question is what kind of problem they have.

And that's where it gets hard to see from the inside.

Why the Fix Doesn't Spread on Its Own

Here's what most operators try: you figure out what's working at your best store and you tell the other GMs to do that. Tighten up waste tracking. Follow the ordering guide. Watch portioning.

Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn't. Not because the advice is wrong — but because the reason Store 7 is running high has nothing to do with what Store 4 is doing right. Store 7's problem might be structural. Their delivery schedule doesn't match their sales pattern, so they over-order early in the week and waste product by Thursday. No amount of coaching the GM fixes that. It requires changing the system.

Meanwhile Store 9 has the opposite issue — their system is fine but their kitchen lead has been there eight weeks and nobody's verified that they're actually following it. That's a management problem, not a systems problem. The fix is oversight, not restructuring.

When you apply a systems fix to a people problem, nothing changes. When you apply a people fix to a systems problem, you burn out your managers and the number still doesn't move. Most multi-unit operators have experienced both of these and couldn't explain why the fix didn't stick.

The Number You're Missing

You know what each store's food cost is. What you probably don't know is what each store's food cost should be — at today's prices, based on what they actually sold.

That gap — between what they spent and what they should have spent — is the number that matters. And it's different at every location, for different reasons.

Your best store has already proven what's achievable in your system. The difference between that number and what everyone else is running is cash you're leaving on the table. Across multiple locations, that's not a rounding error. It's thousands a week.

Every week you don't know the number, that's another week it adds up.

The Hard Part

You could do this analysis yourself. The data exists — it's in your POS and your purchasing records. But building a theoretical food cost model by location, normalizing for menu mix, comparing against actuals, and then diagnosing the root cause at each store takes dedicated time that nobody on your ops team has. They're busy running the business.

And even if they had the time, the person who set up the systems and trained the managers is usually not the best person to objectively assess whether those systems and managers are performing. Not because they're bad at their job — because they're too close to it.

Some things are easier to see from outside the building.

Kwan Howard helps multi-unit restaurant operators find and close food cost gaps across their locations — not with checklists, but with diagnostics built from their own data.

If you're wondering how much the gap between your best and worst store is actually costing you, let's talk.