MenuForge is web-based recipe costing software for independent restaurants and breweries. It tracks ingredient pack prices, reads vendor invoices with AI, and recosts every recipe and sub-recipe automatically. Plans start at $79.95/month, with a 7-day free trial.
Presidential Brewing used MenuForge invoice history to pull their Top 10 spend, sent it to their distributor, and came back with about 14% tighter pricing on the items they buy most. Receipt processing and Top 10 spend are part of the AI+ plan, and both are included in the free trial.
Read the case studyThe loop that replaces the workbook.
Email or upload a vendor invoice. AI reads each line and matches it to a pantry ingredient. You confirm anything it could not place. AI+ and Unlimited
The new case price lands on the ingredient, with price history and alerts when something jumps.
Recipes and nested sub-recipes recost on their own. Plate cost, food cost %, and minimum sell price stay current.
There is no spreadsheet import yet. Most kitchens start with their top 10 dishes: add those ingredients once, and AI can draft a recipe from a short description so you are not retyping every tab. On Essentials, you enter pack prices by hand instead of from invoices.
Real screenshots from the live app. No mockups.
Pink cards have a costing problem (a missing price or a unit that will not convert), red borders are missing prep steps, and dietary flags roll up from every ingredient. AM and PM teams edit the same cards.
Pack sizes, units, item numbers, and vendor variants live on one ingredient, so a GFS case and a Sysco bag never fight over the real cost.
Confirm the unmatched lines and pack costs flow into the pantry, then every recipe that uses them recosts. Price-change alerts call out the spikes worth acting on.
Cost and minimum sell price stay pinned while you type, including cost per serving on a catering bar written for 25.
Track pack cost over time with the percent change called out, and spot seasonality in produce, oils, and proteins before the P&L does.
AI writes the caption from the recipe and its sub-recipes in your brand voice, and the photo is already in the app.
Match Toast items and choices to recipes, and pull sales to see what sold against what it costs to make.
Required sides live on the category, so plate cost includes what actually leaves the window.
Give it a prompt and the sliders. It adds missing ingredients and nested batches, then MenuForge costs the plate against your pack prices.
Save category instructions once, and the next AI draft in Burgers or Catering follows your kitchen rules.
Describe a dish, tune how it builds, and let AI handle recipes, receipts, marketing, and unit math.
The sliders tell AI how to behave before it writes a line. Drag them and the labels react the same way they do in the app.
Balanced plate cost. Enough room for quality without blowing the budget.
Lean on what you already stock. Fewer special orders, faster prep.
A little spark. Classic bones with one unexpected twist.
Email in a vendor invoice. AI reads the page, pulls every line item, and matches it to the right pantry ingredient. Confirm anything it could not place, and pack costs update across every recipe that uses them.
Store pictures of the plate for staff and social. AI reads the recipe and its sub-recipes to write a branded description on the Overview tab — ready for the menu and the post.
Costed against the case price, not a guess.
You buy by weight and cook by volume. Ask AI and it works out the conversion for that ingredient, so a recipe measured in cups still costs against the case price you paid.
MenuForge focuses on recipe costing and ingredient tracking. Toast POS is live. Other POS and accounting tools are on the roadmap.
Sync Toast menus, match items to recipes, and pull sales so you can see what sold against what it costs to make.
No QuickBooks, Restaurant365, or other POS yet. Export ingredients and recipes to Excel for your accountant. Join the waitlist and name the system you need.
MenuForge is not a home-cook recipe app, and it's not an enterprise inventory suite with a six-month implementation. If you have under 5 recipes or need full POS-based inventory counts, this is not your tool.
Plain numbers, so a growing group knows where the ceilings are.
$79.95/mo
$139.95/mo
$189.95/mo
Each account covers one location and one Toast connection. Need more recipes on Essentials or AI+? Add 300 recipes for $35/mo or 500 for $50/mo. Running several locations? Book a walkthrough.
MenuForge is web-based recipe costing software for independent restaurants and breweries. It tracks ingredient pack prices, reads vendor invoices with AI, and recosts every recipe and sub-recipe automatically. Plans start at $79.95/month, with a 7-day free trial.
MenuForge Essentials is $79.95/month, AI+ is $139.95/month, and Unlimited is $189.95/month. Annual billing saves 10%. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial of AI+, no credit card required.
Not yet. MenuForge does not import Excel or CSV recipe workbooks today. Most kitchens start with their top 10 dishes: add the ingredients once, and AI can draft a recipe from a short description so you are not retyping every tab.
Not yet. Toast POS is the only live integration. You can export your ingredients and recipes to Excel for your accountant, and other POS and accounting tools are on the roadmap.
Receipt processing is included on AI+ and Unlimited, and in the free trial. Essentials does not include it.
No. AI drafts recipes, descriptions, and unit conversions. Plate cost always comes from your own pack prices and invoices, and you review an AI draft before it is saved.
Each MenuForge account covers one location and one Toast connection. Restaurant groups with several locations should book a walkthrough so we can talk through setup.
More answers on the pricing page.
Why MenuForge exists
I used to price every recipe in Excel. Capturing sub-recipe costs accurately was a pain, and nobody else on my team could use the workbook. After a walkout left our recipes in one cook's head, I built the tool I needed at Presidential Brewing Company.
Jake Lohse, founder. Read the story
Real operators on costing, prep, and getting the team off spreadsheets
Reviews collected from MenuForge users. Some reviewers requested first-name-only attribution.
Honestly the receipt thing sold me. We used to print invoices, sticky-note the price changes, and hope somebody typed them into the sheet before Friday. Half the time we found out we were underwater on wings after the weekend was already over. Now the invoice comes in, we confirm the matches, and the recipes that use that pack just… update. My closers actually trust the numbers.
From the founder
I used to price all of my recipes in Microsoft Excel. Capturing the costs of all subrecipes accurately was a pain in the neck, and my team was not capable of using the tool for accurate recipe costing. MenuForge has changed everything. Now, even my least tech-savvy team members know exactly what to do. MenuForge is so intuitive that they could pick it up quickly and run with it. Goodbye spreadsheets!
I got tired of guests asking if something was gluten free and three different people giving three different answers. We were basically guessing based on who made the sauce that morning. Having the flags roll up from the ingredients (including the batch stuff) means the ticket and the menu finally say the same thing. Sounds small. It is not small when you are in the weeds.
Our demi and the house vinaigrette were quietly wrecking food cost because nobody wanted to reopen the spreadsheet and redo the parents. I would change a case price and just… leave it. In MenuForge the batch sits inside the dish, so when I fix the sauce once, the steaks and the salads move with it. First time I printed a specials board and believed the MSP without doing math on a deli ticket.
I write like a GM, not a copywriter, and it showed. We were shipping Facebook posts that sounded like a hotel brochure. I hit AI Generate on a few dishes, edited maybe two sentences, and it still sounded like our place. Same afternoon the photo and the caption went out. My marketing person almost cried. In a good way.
Price history showed the oil creep we had been shrugging off. We renegotiated the case before the next quarter.
New hires open a recipe and see prep, cost, and allergens in one place. Training weeks got shorter overnight.
Pastry lives in ounces and bakers cups and whatever the produce guy decided a flat of berries means this week. I used to keep a greasy conversion note taped inside the reach-in. Someone would peel it off. Chaos. Being able to ask for the conversion and still cost against the case we actually bought saved me from another “why is tart food cost 48%” meeting I did not want to have.
I do not love software. I love not getting blindsided. The pink cards on the recipe grid are kind of annoying until you realize they are doing you a favor. Missing price, weird unit, whatever. We fix it before service instead of finding out when the month-end packet shows a surprise. My controller thinks I suddenly got organized. I did not. The grid did.
Multi-user access means the AM and PM teams edit the same truth. No more mystery versions of the chili recipe.
Social posts used to wait on a designer. Now the dish photo and caption leave from the same recipe card.
Vendor variants finally live under one pantry ingredient. GFS and Sysco packs stopped fighting over the real cost.
Minimum sell price in the header keeps us from underpricing a special when food costs jump midweek.
Seasonality in raw goods is obvious once you chart it. We plan produce-heavy specials when the trend dips.
Prep steps live with the recipe, not in a binder nobody updates. Consistency across shifts got boring in the best way.
We generate a draft recipe from a vibe, then tighten costs before it ever hits the menu. Idea to plate got faster.
Alerts when a pack price crosses our threshold. Quiet cost creep does not get to hide for three invoices anymore.
A fully loaded 7-day AI+ trial. No credit card. 10 receipts and 5 AI recipes included.
Your recipes and costs are encrypted, exportable, and never sold. How we protect your data