Selling Price Builder for Restaurants

① The band, and the floor the menu no longer respects

Standard cost of the garlic trout, with weighed portions and waste included: 17,800 COP. Price on the menu today: 52,000.

The trout is selling 4,000 COP below its own floor. Across the 610 units in the month that is 2,440,000 COP the house is not charging because of a price nobody revisited.

Two checks before going further. The ceiling over the floor gives 1.11 times: this is a real band and not two dishes disguised as one —above 1.4 it would have to be split—. And the 62,000 fits inside the menu, which runs from 28,000 to 72,000, without breaking the ladder of its section.

And here the band collides with the goal, so it gets said and not hidden. The house wants to lift operating margin from 8 % to 14 % without touching menu prices. So this band is not a recommendation to raise: it is the exact measure of what this dish is giving away while the goal is chased from another direction.

② The two ways out that do not touch the menu

Way out A — bring the cost down to the floor, without moving the price. For the trout to respect its floor at 52,000, the standard cost has to drop from 17,800 to 16,536: 1,264 COP per plate, 7.1 %. That is portioning and suppliers, not the menu. Across 610 units it is 771,040 COP a month.

Way out B — move the price only where it is not the menu: the platform. The delivery platform is not the printed menu, and the same dish already leaves something different there:

Every trout that goes out through the platform leaves 13,600 COP less than the same trout at a table. To match the dining-room margin, the platform price would have to be 69,900 COP: it fits the menu range, but right at the top. The decision belongs to the owner and there are three of them, not one — raise the platform price only, take the trout off the platform, or accept that on that channel the dish is for acquisition and not for margin. What cannot continue is not deciding, because right now the platform is deciding on its own.

The three-line justification for the recommended price, as you would say it to the owner at his table. The 56,000 floor is not an opinion: it is the weighed cost divided by the target that came out of his own goal. The 58,000 gives 2,000 COP of air so the next rise in fish does not put him back under the floor. And while the menu stays untouched, the recommended price does not get printed: it gets kept as the measure of what waiting costs.

SUPUESTO: the 62,000 ceiling rests on three trout references in Medellín the owner named from memory during the session —58,000, 64,000 and 67,000— and which were not verified against a published menu. Source: the owner himself, with no document at hand. If on confirming them the lowest came in at 58,000 or less, the ceiling drops to 58,000, the band flattens to 56,000-58,000 and 2,000 COP of range are left: at that point the conversation stops being about price and becomes about cost. Confirm all three before using this ceiling for anything.