Know your food cost before you quote.
Ingredient prices change. Headcounts change. Menus change. Better Cater keeps your recipes, menu items, shopping lists, and event profit connected — so you can quote with confidence and protect your margin.
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Better kitchen planning. More accurate quotes. Fewer missed items. Clearer event profit.
Not just for the chef — owners, sales managers, and admins work from the same numbers the kitchen does.
The problem
Brisket went up 60¢ a pound. Your price sheet didn’t notice.
Ingredient prices creep every month, but most menus get re-costed once a year — if that. Quote from stale numbers and the margin quietly walks out the back door.
You find out at the end of the quarter. By then it’s already gone.
brisket $4.25/lb… wait, invoice says $4.85??
…probably?
Recipe costing
Every menu item knows what it costs to make.
Build the recipe once — ingredients, quantities, yield. When an ingredient price changes, the cost rolls up through every recipe and menu item that uses it. (Even if your recipes live in a binder today — they go in once, and they stay costed forever.)
So when you price brisket at $8.50 a portion, you know the margin behind it, not just the going rate.
Shopping lists
The buy list builds itself from your calendar.
Pick the events, and ingredient quantities roll up across all of them — scaled to headcount, in purchase units. Nothing gets missed on the buy, and nothing gets bought twice.
Kitchen reports
The kitchen runs off the sheet, not your memory.
BEOs, kitchen production counts, packing lists, and recipe sheets — all generated from the events themselves. When a headcount changes, the reports change with it.
Profit
See which events actually made money.
You can taste when a menu’s right. Whether it made money shouldn’t be a guess.
Food cost from recipes, revenue from the event — the profit report puts them side by side, per event. Find the menus and clients worth doing again.
The morning buy, list in hand — built straight from the calendar.
From menu to shopping list to margin
Better Cater connects sales, menus, kitchen prep, and profit analysis so your team works from the same event details — from quote to kitchen report to final margin.
Recipes & ingredients
Ingredient costs, quantities, and yields — entered once, reused everywhere.
Food cost on every item
Cost per portion and food-cost percentage, live on the menu item as prices change.
Shopping lists
Roll up the buy across every event on the calendar, scaled to headcount.
BEO & kitchen reports
Banquet event orders, production counts, and recipe sheets from the event itself.
Packing lists
Per-event lists so every truck leaves with everything it needs.
Profit report
Revenue against food cost, per event — know which jobs are worth repeating.
Ingredient-level recipe costing wired straight through to per-event profit — rare in a system that also does proposals and BEOs.
Quote with your margin in front of you.
Build costed menus, generate shopping lists, and see event profit from the same catering system your team uses to manage the job.
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