Keeping it current: price creep, history, and re-pricing menus

Every food cost number you calculate is only as true as the prices behind it. A cost guide that's six months stale doesn't give you slightly-off answers — it gives you confident, precise, wrong ones. This guide is about the upkeep routine that keeps it honest.

Price creep is the default, not the exception

Individual price increases are small on purpose — 3% here, a nickel there, a “temporary” surcharge that never leaves. None of them trigger a reaction. But they compound: a basket rising a quiet 1% a month is up more than 12% over a year, and you find out when you finally reconcile a quarter's invoices and wonder where the margin went.

The only defense is a routine that catches small moves while they're still small.

A realistic update routine

• Per delivery (5 minutes): when you receive an order, update the prices for anything that changed on that invoice. Not every item — just the ones that moved. This is where 90% of your upkeep should happen, in small doses.
• Monthly (20 minutes): scan your top 30–40 items — the ones that drive your food cost — against the latest invoices and quotes. Update anything that's drifted.
• Quarterly (1 hour): ask backup vendors for fresh quotes on your key items, update those lines, and review whether any pinned preferred vendors still make sense. See tracking vendors.

If updating after a delivery takes more than five minutes, your guide is too big. Trim it to the items that matter and the routine becomes sustainable.

Using price history

Every time you change an item's price, Food Cost Guide records the old value with a date. Over a few months that history becomes a small chart per item, and it answers questions a single current price can't:

• Is this a spike or a step? A price that jumped and came back down is seasonal noise — don't re-engineer a dish around it. A price that stepped up and stayed is a new baseline.
• How fast is this item moving? An ingredient up 20% over two quarters deserves a menu conversation even if today's number still looks acceptable.
• Is a vendor's “deal” real? History shows whether the price they just quoted is actually below where they've been.

Knowing when a re-price is overdue

Some signals that it's time to revisit menu prices, not just the guide:

• A dish has crossed from your comfortable threshold band into the watch band and stayed there for more than a few weeks — and the guide is current, so it's real.
• Your blended food cost across what you actually sell has moved 2+ points from where your model needs it.
• It's been more than a year since the last menu print, in any market where costs have moved at all.
• A single high-volume ingredient (oil, chicken, dairy, coffee) has had a sustained double-digit increase — those flow through enough dishes to matter on their own.

When you do re-price, work from costed recipes, not gut feel: set the sell price that hits your target margin at today's costs, then sanity-check it against what the market and your guests will bear. See reading your food cost %.

Back up your work

In the free, no-account tools, your cost guide and recipes live in your browser. That means they're private — nothing is uploaded — but it also means they're only as safe as that browser. Export a backup after any significant update, and keep the file somewhere you won't lose it. If you'd rather have it synced and backed up for you, that's what an account is for.