Repricing a menu when inputs move

Not every price move deserves a new menu

Wholesale prices shift every week. Butter jumps, eggs dip, cream firms up. If you repriced every time a report moved, your menu would never sit still. The trick is knowing which moves actually matter to your plate cost and which ones you can absorb.

Two things decide that: how much of your plate cost that ingredient represents, and how big the move is. A 20% swing in an ingredient that's 2% of your cost barely touches the bottom line. A 5% swing in an ingredient that's 25% of your cost is a real problem. Multiply share by move size before you react to either number alone.

The quick math

For any dish, estimate:

• Share: what percent of total plate cost this input represents
• Move: the percent change in the wholesale price since your last pricing pass

Then multiply. Share times move gives you the rough percent change in total plate cost from that one input. If that number is small, under a point or two, it's noise. Let it ride. If it's larger, it's signal, and you need a plan.

This is why eggs and butter get watched closely on kitchens that bake or run breakfast heavy menus. They often carry enough share that even modest weekly moves add up to a real number.

Eat it, wait it out, or reprice

Once you know a move is real, you have three options.

Eat the spike. Fine for short-lived moves, especially around holidays or weather events that history says tend to snap back. Track it on live shell egg prices or the relevant series so you're not guessing whether it's temporary.

Wait and confirm. If a move has held for a few reporting cycles, not just one data point, it's more likely structural. One week of higher cheese prices might be noise. A month of higher prices is a trend.

Reprice. When the move is large relative to share, and it's held long enough to look structural, adjust the menu. Waiting past that point just means eating margin you won't get back.

There's no fixed threshold that works for every kitchen. A high volume, low margin operation needs to move faster than a place with more room in its pricing. But the share times move math gives you a consistent way to flag which inputs are worth watching closely, week over week, versus which you can check monthly.

Passing it through without guessing

Once you decide to reprice, the next question is how much of the cost increase to pass to the menu price. Full pass-through protects margin but can hit sales if the increase looks aggressive. Partial pass-through spreads the pain but slowly erodes margin if inputs keep climbing.

This isn't a gut call. It's arithmetic once you know your target margin, your current price, and the size of the cost increase. Rather than work it by hand every time an input moves, run it through the pass-through calculator. Plug in the new wholesale number, your plate cost share, and your margin target, and it tells you what the menu price needs to be to hold your numbers steady.

The goal isn't to reprice constantly or never. It's to reprice on the moves that matter, backed by the actual data, not by whichever ingredient happened to spike in the headlines that week.