A supplier price increase notice usually arrives as a single line — "effective next month, X is up 15%" — with no indication of what that actually does to your margin. This tool turns that notice into a concrete number: the dollar cost increase, the food cost percentage swing, and a suggested price adjustment to hold your target margin.
How supplier price impact is calculated
Multiply your usage volume by the old unit cost and by the new unit cost to get total cost under each price, and the difference between them is your cost increase. If you provide your current menu price, the tool also shows exactly how the increase shifts your food cost percentage for that dish — and if you provide a target food cost percentage, it suggests the new price that would hold you at that target despite the higher input cost.
Why generic cost tracking misses this
Most cost tracking is retrospective — it tells you what happened last month after the invoices are already in. A supplier price increase is a forward-looking event you usually know about before it takes effect. Modeling the impact ahead of time — on this specific dish, at this specific volume — turns a reactive bookkeeping problem into a proactive pricing decision you can make before the higher cost ever hits your books.
Worked example
A protein currently costing $4 per unit rises to $4.60 — a 15% increase. At 400 units used per period, that's a $240 increase in total cost. On a dish currently priced at $18 with that protein as the primary cost driver, food cost percentage shifts from 22.2% to 25.6%. To hold a 25% target food cost with the new $4.60 cost, the suggested price is $18.40 — a modest adjustment that fully absorbs the supplier increase without overcorrecting.
Common mistakes and how to use this
- Absorbing every increase without modeling it. Small percentage increases feel easy to ignore individually, but compounded across a menu and a year, unmodeled supplier increases are one of the most common silent causes of margin erosion.
- Overcorrecting on price.Raising price by the full percentage the supplier raised theirs often overshoots your actual target — this tool's suggested price is calibrated to your target food cost, not a 1:1 pass-through.
- Not updating the underlying recipe cost too.Once a supplier increase sticks, update the ingredient's cost in your recipe & plate cost calculator so future costing reflects reality, not the old price.