Food cost & variance — built for Toast
See the dollars leaking between counts
Your sales say you should have used 38 lbs of cheese. Your counts say 52 lbs left the shelf. AnchOps puts a dollar figure on that gap — item by item, every count window — and tells you which menu items did the consuming.
Labor is half of prime cost. This is the other half.
15-day free trial · No credit card · Connects to Toast in minutes
Theoretical vs. actual — the only food cost math that matters
A food cost percentage alone tells you something is wrong. Variance tells you what, where, and how much it cost you.
Ranked by dollar impact. Tap a line to see exactly which menu items consumed it. Counts, deliveries, and invoices all land in the window automatically.
Recipes
Map the menu once. Every sale becomes usage.
Point each Toast menu item at the ingredients it consumes — in counting units, single pieces, or ounces. Modifiers carry their own quantities. Interchangeable products pool together so a brand switch never breaks the math.
- Quantities in the unit that makes sense: 2 oz of sauce, 1 dough ball, half a case
- Modifier rules: extra ranch consumes ranch, wherever it's sold
- Item groups with equivalence — two sizes of the same dough pool as one stock
- Pizza module: size drives every quantity — see the pizza page
Sold 41 this week
= 41 rolls, 164 meatballs, 10.3 lb marinara, 5.1 lb mozzarella — counted against your shelves automatically.
→ Mozzarella
→ Dough balls
→ Pepperoni
Vendor lines map to your items once — AnchOps remembers. Price moves are flagged against the trailing 90-day average.
Invoice scanning
Your food cost runs on this week's prices
Most restaurants compute food cost on prices from whenever someone last updated the spreadsheet. AnchOps reads prices off the actual invoices: photograph the pages, confirm the lines, done. Costs stay current, cheese price creep gets flagged, and confirmed deliveries become the source of truth for what arrived.
- Snap multi-page invoices in the mobile app
- Lines extracted automatically; map each vendor item once
- Cost per unit updates from the latest confirmed invoice
- Price moves flagged against your 90-day average
Prime cost has two halves. AnchOps runs both.
The same Toast connection that powers your food cost also drives labor budgets, sales forecasts, and a schedule that publishes itself. One system, one data source, both halves of the number that decides whether you made money this week.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does AnchOps know what my sales should have used?
You map each menu item to the ingredients it consumes — a recipe. Modifiers can carry their own quantities, interchangeable items (two brands of the same cheese) pool together, and pizza gets its own module where size drives every quantity. From there, every sale that syncs from Toast turns into theoretical usage automatically.
What does the variance report actually show me?
Between any two completed counts: what you started with, what arrived, what you sold should have used, and what's actually left — per item, ranked by dollar impact. A line that's off by $80 of cheese in one week is a conversation; the report tells you which conversation to have, and can show exactly which menu items consumed the item.
How does invoice scanning work?
Photograph the invoice pages in the mobile app. AnchOps extracts the lines, you map each vendor item to your inventory item once, and it remembers the mapping forever. Confirmed invoices update your cost per unit — so food cost math runs on this week's prices, not last quarter's — and they're the source of truth for what was actually received.
Do I need Toast for food cost?
Yes — variance and theoretical usage need real sales data, and AnchOps reads it from Toast automatically. The inventory layer underneath (counts, ordering, self-tuning pars) works with no POS at all, so you can start there and connect Toast when you're ready.
We're a pizzeria — can it handle size-driven recipes?
That's exactly why the pizza module exists. Define your size classes once (10″, 14″, 16″…), set how much dough, sauce, cheese and each topping a size uses, and every pizza sale resolves to ingredients automatically — including half-and-half toppings and extra/light modifiers. See the pizza page for the full story.
How much does AnchOps cost?
$59.99 per month per location, flat — unlimited employees, every feature included, no add-on module pricing. There's a free 15-day trial with no credit card required.
Find out where the cheese is going
Connect Toast, map your top 20 items, run two counts. The first variance report usually pays for the year.