The Menu Cost Report — Your Menu, Costed Plate by Plate, From Your Own Numbers | Fast, Cheap & Confident

Send your menu and your ingredient costs. Get back every plate costed, the quiet money-losers flagged, and the swaps that fix them — all computed from your numbers.

Ask a food truck owner what each plate costs to make and you'll usually get a shrug and a number from two years ago. This report ends the shrug.

The Menu Cost Report works like this: you send your menu, your prices, and what you pay for ingredients (receipts and menu-board photos are fine — no spreadsheet required). I cost out every plate on your menu from the numbers you submitted:

- Cost per plate, food-cost %, and gross dollars per plate, on one page, for your whole menu

- The quiet losers flagged — the plates your own numbers condemn, with the arithmetic shown, not vibes

- Swap suggestions from real budget-cooking methods (the same swap system my Dinner Rescue book runs on), each one recomputed so you see exactly what it does to a plate's cost before you decide anything

Three honesty rules run this report. One: no outside benchmarks — I never tell you what a plate "should" cost; I show you what yours does. Two: where a figure has to be estimated because you don't track it, it's printed with the word ESTIMATE and the method, so you always know which numbers are yours (every figure in your report is labeled SUBMITTED, DERIVED from your numbers with the working shown, or ESTIMATE). Three: your menu and your costs are your business secrets — they're used for your report only, never quoted, never shown to another operator.

What this report is not: it's not accounting, not a pricing decision (your prices stay your call), not food-safety or code advice, and it guarantees nothing about profit. It's arithmetic — your arithmetic — most operators have simply never seen done on one page.

How it works: order → intake sheet by email the same day → your 7 business days start when your menu and costs are complete (or you've marked the gaps ESTIMATE OK) → I run the numbers, Jerry reviews every report personally, and your PDF arrives. Late means a full refund. If your numbers are too thin to compute honestly, I'll tell you that and refund you instead of dressing up a guess.

Capacity, honestly: each report is real arithmetic on a real menu, so only 1 report is in flight at a time and at most 2 new orders are accepted per month at launch.

FAQ:

Q: I don't know my per-plate costs. At all.

A: Normal. Send case and pack prices the way your supplier prints them; the sheet walks you through it, and the estimate rules above cover the rest.

Q: Will you tell me what to charge?

A: No. I'll show you what each plate costs and what a swap does to that cost. Pricing is your call and your market.

Q: I run a café, not a truck.

A: Same report — it works on any short menu.

Q: What happens after?

A: If you want the forward planning system afterward, that's the Kitchen Ops Kit — the report mentions it once, at the end, and that's all. (The report fee is not credited toward the kit.)