Saffron Table Group cut food cost 6.2 points and added $1.4M with a POS and recipe-synced inventory
An 8-location restaurant group had no idea which dishes made money and which bled it. A POS with recipe-level inventory sync, kitchen display, and live food-cost dashboards cut waste, killed the dead menu items, and lifted margin across every location.
This is an illustrative case study. Company names, identifying details, and testimonials have been changed to protect client confidentiality. The technical solution and target outcomes are representative of the work we do. We extend the same confidentiality to every client.
Where they started
Saffron Table's 8 restaurants each rang sales on a different POS, and inventory was counted by hand once a month — by which point the waste was already eaten. The group's executive chef couldn't tell you the actual food cost percentage on any dish, because the recipe quantities and the inventory counts lived in separate spreadsheets that nobody reconciled. Three menu items were selling well but losing money on every plate, and the group was throwing away an estimated $480K a year in food waste — mostly over-prep that got tossed at close. Multi-location reporting meant the CFO spent a week a month assembling a spreadsheet that was already stale by the time it landed.
What we built
We deployed our POS Terminal platform across all 8 locations with a unified menu and recipe database, so every ring at the register automatically decrements the exact ingredients in inventory. The kitchen display system routes tickets by station, and a live food-cost dashboard shows actual vs. theoretical cost per dish, per shift, per location in real time. Cycle counts run on tablets, low-stock alerts trigger auto-reorders to the right supplier, and multi-location sales and margin reporting generates on demand. The dead menu items were flagged in the first two weeks of data.
Target outcomes
More from this project
We thought our best-selling lamb dish was printing money. The first food-cost report showed it was losing $4 a plate. We re-costed the menu in a week, cut the dead items, and the margin moved the very next month. The $1.4M is real — I can show you the P&L.
Representative testimonial — name and role changed to protect client identity.