Retail, Prepared Foods, Grab and Go, Bakery

A successful retail foodservice operation, including prepared foods, grab & go, bakeries, and delis, MUST have accurate recipe pre-costing.

You need to use batch and prep recipes freely in other recipes, and you need to portion batch recipes easily into serving recipes. Price changes should be entered once, and ripple through all the affected recipes. Actual to target food costs are essential in monitoring your profitability, and managing price creep.

CostGuard prepared foods and production kitchen software provides all these features, and more:

  • Production
  • Recipe scaling/converting
  • Accurate food costing: the key to your profitability is a selling price that achieves your profit target. You can only accomplish this WITH ACCURATE FOOD COSTS. CostGuard ALWAYS calculates recipes at your current costs, so you’re assured of accuracy.
  • Batch recipes: create large scale prep recipes, and portion them out in your selling recipes (catchweight, slice, piece, by container, etc.)..
  • Change the batch recipe once, and it ripples through all of your selling recipes automatically!
  • Bakery formulas calculated in weights

Recommended for Retail, Prepared Foods, Bakery and Deli operations, the Choice Suite, consisting of:

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Whether you’re a grocery store chain, independent retailer, baker, etc., you will absolutely benefit from these CostGuard features.

How the Choice Suite can Benefit your business:

Reprices recipes directly from your inventory items. Price changes update recipes instantly!

SmartScaling

converts recipes to larger and smaller yields and also converts units intelligently. See how it’s done

Overhead

is automatically calculated and added to your food costs. See how it’s done

Food List

(shopping list) that automatically generates production sheets, prep lists, orders, etc.A terrific tool for your daily production.See how it’s done.

Prep Recipes

Prep Recipes are made in batches, marinara sauce for example. If you take a physical count of the walk-in cooler you will see the sauce on the shelf and may need to “count” it for inventory purposes. The Prep Tab will assign locations and count units as if this was an Inventory Item.
See how it’s done.

Recipe Standardization

Standardize your recipes, add graphics,photo and import media from scanners, digital cameras, VCR’s, clip art, etc.

See how it’s done

Menu Planning

Includes pricing, and standardizing. There’s no limit to the number of items and sub-recipes per recipe.

See how it’s done

Target Food Costs

globally or by category (e.g.,entrees, appetizers, desserts, etc.)

See how it’s done

Import/Export

to easily distribute new concepts to other units.

See how it’s done

Options:

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Cost Guard Software has been one of the smartest business moves I have made.

As a chef for over 35 years, working in many cities in the US and even France, I can say that I never really worked in an place that followed strict recipes in cooking with the exception of the biggest hotels where I spent several years.

It really is no wonder that so many small restaurants fail!! Why? It’s pretty simple, the majority of customers are looking for consistency, value and a good dining experience no matter what level of food establishment they end up eating at. “Good Food Starts Here” is my company’s tag line. We have good chefs (they are actually great), we buy quality ingredients and we follow good recipes.

Cost Guard provides an up to the penny cost analysis of every recipe on our menu. We have been in business for 10 years, our sales go up every year by double – digit percentages and I have used Cost Guard to navigate the way to a healthy bottom line every year. I cannot imagine cooking “for profit” without it.

Andrew Rolleri, Owner
The Pantry – Fairfield, CT 06824
www.thepantry.net

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I’ve been using Cost Guard for over 20 years now. I was initially introduced to the program as the Executive Chef for Whole Foods Market when we used it to simply cost and keep track of our extensive recipe archives. Over the years I have used Cost Guard successfully as a consultant to the retail prepared food service industry in dozens of operations nationally.
In fact, I have brought in CostGuard to replace several of the larger software programs for many key reasons. It is simple to set up and manage. It does exactly what is needed for the entire procurement and production pipeline and is uncomplicated in its approach to our industry needs.
Whether I am working in a large singular operation or one with multiple locations it does the same thing. It’s a logical solution and invaluable tool for developing recipes, food cost and then implementing standard operating procedures. It quietly functions solidly in the background, and stays true to our needs.
Management can relate and appreciate the efficiency of CostGuard. All important hourly employees that use the end product are easily able to follow the recipes as well. It remains the heart and soul of my new recipe development toolbox.

Steven Petusevsky
Author of The Whole Foods Market Cookbook
Lifestyle Contributor~Chicago Tribune News Service
954.494.7055
steve@chefsteves.com
www.stevenpetusevsky.com

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Some nicely implemented software – CostGuard

I had mentioned that after trying the demo for a month or so I finally sprung for the full version of CostGuard.
This is a well thought out and deep application.

You first set up your Vendors (Costco, FSA, UNFI,);
Then Super Groups (Food, Beverages, Paper, Chemicals…)
Then the Groups (Meat, Coffee, Chocolate, Milk, Napkins, Cleansers

And finally the individual items. Say for example a 3 Pound bag of Christopher Ranch peeled Garlic cloves.
For this item, you can assign the vendor, the weight, your cost, where it is stored, what your par, reorder and purchase quantities are and finally, you can enter the (in this case Costco) vendors SKU number.

The thing that caught my eye is that there is a receipt mode — you are out shopping and sit down with the receipt and start typing in SKUs. The program will take your input and add these items to the inventory, you can print out a sheet showing where everything lives and just after you input the you have the option to adjust the price if there is a change.

The work flow is very smooth but versatile. Looking forward to a couple weeks of part-time data entry and to then start using this puppy. It rocks!

From the blog of Dave Halliday, Manager, Harvest Moon Bakery