% open food-cost-calculator
Food-Cost Calculator
A venue imports one file and sees its own real food costs. No typing.
PROBLEM
Every food-cost tool dies the same way. Nobody wants to hand-type their whole pantry and menu into it, so the chef never switches and keeps flying blind on margin. The tool was never the hard part. The moving in is.
WHAT I BUILT
A single-file food-cost calculator, plus a way to skip the data entry entirely. For WATDA (a Korean spot in Ponsonby) I read their actual supplier invoices and recipe sheet out of their Drive, pulled their live menu prices off their own site, and turned the lot into one import file. They open the tool, import once, and they're looking at their own real numbers.
HOW IT WORKS
The calculator is one static HTML file (vanilla JS, no backend, saved in the browser). The real work is the onboarding: I read 12 invoices across 7 suppliers, normalised every pack price to per kg/L/each, and built an 86-ingredient library with 48 real prices and supplier names attached. A Node script assembles it into a validated JSON profile (86 ingredients, 33 menu items at their real prices) that drops straight into the tool. Staples with no invoice line are left blank and flagged, so the venue finishes the last few in about fifteen minutes.
WHERE IT'S AT
Tool live on Cloudflare Pages. WATDA's import file is built off their real invoices and menu, packaged with a README and handoff note, in testing before it goes to their team. First real venue, not handed over yet.
WHAT I LEARNED
The build of the calculator was easy. The interesting part was the invoices: 7 suppliers, every format different, pack sizes everywhere, prices that needed normalising before a single number meant anything. That's the work that normally lands on the chef. Move it off their plate and the tool actually gets used.
STACK
Static HTML · vanilla JS · localStorage · Node (profile builder) · Cloudflare Pages · Google Drive
% cd ..