Recipe costing for brewery taprooms and kitchens

MenuForge costs the food and drinks a taproom sells: pretzels, wings, smash burgers, house sauces, and the cocktail and N/A menu behind the bar. Batch recipes roll up into every dish and drink that uses them, and invoices update the case price automatically. It does not cost your beer recipes or run the brewhouse.

A brewery already did the math. Presidential Brewing used MenuForge invoice history to pull their top 10 items by spend, took the list to their distributor, and came back with about 14% tighter pricing. That projects to roughly $8,800 a year from ten line items. Read how they did it.

What a taproom gets out of it

• Live plate cost on the kitchen menu. Every burger, pretzel board, and basket of wings shows its cost and food cost % as you build it, against the case price you actually paid.
• Batch sauces and house mixes that roll up. Beer cheese, wing sauce, simple syrup, and sour mix are batch recipes with their own yield. Change the price of cheddar once and the beer cheese, the pretzel board, and the burger all recost.
• Cocktails and N/A drinks on the same system. Spirits, mixers, garnishes, and batched syrups get costed per pour the same way food is costed per plate.
• Required sides on the category. Put fries on the Burgers category once, and every burger’s plate cost includes them.
• Invoices in, costs updated. Email a distributor invoice and AI matches each line to a pantry ingredient. Pack costs update and every recipe that uses them recosts. Receipt processing is on the AI+ and Unlimited plans and included in the free trial.
• Toast POS. If the taproom runs Toast, match menu items and modifiers to recipes and pull sales to see what sold against what it costs to make.

Batch yields, done honestly

A gallon of beer cheese does not cost the sum of its ingredients divided by the number of servings you hoped for. MenuForge stores the batch yield on the batch recipe, so a 2 oz portion on the pretzel board costs exactly its share of the batch. Batches can nest inside batches (house seasoning inside a burger blend inside a patty), and the cost flows all the way up.

What MenuForge does not do for breweries

• It does not cost beer recipes, track brewhouse batches, or manage fermentation.
• It does not handle TTB reporting, excise taxes, or keg tracking.
• It is not a brewery inventory or production system. Use your brewery software for the beer, and MenuForge for the kitchen and bar.

Getting started

Start with your ten best-selling food items. Add the ingredients once with the pack sizes from your last distributor invoice, build the two or three batch sauces they share, and the menu is costed. AI can draft a recipe from a short description so you are not typing every line. There is no spreadsheet import, so most taprooms spend an afternoon on the first ten dishes and add the rest as they go.

Questions