Food cost percentage
Food cost against food revenue, read weekly. Most kitchens target somewhere in the low thirties; the ones in trouble do not know the number at all and find out at the annual audit.
Almost every restaurant that closes in Pune was busy at some point. The ones that survive know their food cost to the percentage point, know what each dish on the menu actually earns, and do not discover in month fourteen that the aggregator is the only reason the covers look healthy.
Vinayak Jadhav ran kitchens and bars before and alongside building Plan With YOLO — The Goat Kitchen, Mmyra Lounge, L3 The Liquid Leisure Lounge and Raj Garden Family Resto & Bar. So this is written from the back of the house: a roster that has to work when two stewards do not turn up, a bar shortage that has to be explained, a health inspection that arrives without notice, and a Tuesday with eleven covers.
Most restaurant problems in Pune are not food problems. The food is usually fine. The problems are cost percentages nobody tracks weekly, a menu where the best-selling dish has the thinnest margin, staffing built for Saturday and paid for on Tuesday, and a Google listing with four photographs and a 3.8.
We work on the operating layer. We do not cook — Plan With YOLO coordinates caterers and does not provide food — and we are not your CA. See restaurant and cafe launch if the question is opening rather than running.
Every photo here is from an event our team planned and ran.
Forty to a hundred covers, owner present most days, and the classic Pune profile for this work.
Lower ticket, higher footfall, and a cost structure where wastage matters more than food cost.
A dining room plus a function space, which is two businesses with one kitchen. See <a href="/banquet-hall-management-in-pune/">banquet hall management</a>.
No footfall at all, so aggregator economics and packaging cost are the entire P&L.
Two to five outlets where the second one is quietly funding the third and nobody has separated the numbers.
Beverage changes the economics completely. See <a href="/resto-bar-management-in-pune/">resto bar management</a>.
Room-tariff-linked tax treatment, banquet revenue and a kitchen serving three outlets.
Where the numbers have to be clean and documented before anybody looks at them.
In this order, because the first two cost nothing.
Food cost, beverage cost, labour and rent as percentages of revenue, every week on one sheet. The bands operators work to are well known — food in the low thirties, beverage in the low twenties, labour around a fifth to a quarter, rent under a tenth — and a restaurant outside them on any line knows where its problem is within an hour of writing the numbers down. Most never write them down.
Sort every item by units sold and contribution per unit. High-volume low-margin items get repriced or re-costed. High-margin low-volume items get moved to the top of the section and described better. The genuinely dead items come off, which also shortens prep, reduces stock and speeds up service. This is the single highest-return week of work available in a restaurant and it requires no capital.
Commission plus the discount you are funding plus the visibility ads you bought, against the contribution those orders actually leave. Many Pune kitchens are running a third of their volume at close to zero or below and treating it as growth. The answer is rarely to leave the platform — it is to stop funding the orders that lose money and keep the ones that do not.
Covers by hour for four weeks, then a roster shaped like that curve. Split shifts and staggered starts are unpopular and they are the difference between a labour line at twenty per cent and one at thirty.
A clean listing, real photographs, correct hours, a reply to every review and a reason for regulars to come on a weekday. Doing this before the cost structure is fixed just brings more people to a loss-making operation. See local SEO and social media.
Most people start here with a search rather than a recommendation, and the first results are the ones paying for the position or carrying the most reviews. Neither tells you whether a team has set up in a hall like yours.
Ask for an itemised scope, ask who is on site on the day, and ask what they have set up in Pune already. The answers sort a list of ten down to two. Our contact page has both numbers and WhatsApp, and you will get an itemised scope back rather than one figure.
Can't find yours? Call or WhatsApp — a planner answers.
No. Plan With YOLO does not do catering — for events we coordinate the client's caterer and never provide the food ourselves. On this work we operate and improve your kitchen's numbers, rosters, menu and process. Your chef and your kitchen stay yours.
Mostly measurement. Weekly cost sheets, covers by hour, a menu performance sort, a stock count process and a licence calendar. Nothing structural, because changing a restaurant before you can see it is guessing. The decisions start in month two and are usually menu pricing and the roster shape.
Almost never entirely, and almost always partly. The honest exercise is to separate the orders that contribute from the ones you are subsidising through discounts and ad spend, and stop funding the second group. Kitchens that walk away completely usually find the walk-in volume they expected to replace it does not arrive.
An FSSAI licence, Shops and Establishment registration, the municipal health or trade licence, an eating house licence from the police, fire clearance, a signage permission for the board, GST registration, and a public performance licence if recorded music is played. Liquor adds an excise licence on top. We track what you hold and what is due; the fees and the applications are handled by the agents and professionals who do that work.
You cannot delete it, and anybody offering to is selling something that will eventually hurt you. What works is slower: fix the thing the reviews complain about, reply to every review as the owner, add real photographs, keep the hours accurate, and ask satisfied regulars at the table. A 3.8 moves over months, not weeks.
We quote a fee for the scope, and for longer engagements an improvement-linked component is possible where the baseline can be measured honestly. What we do not do is take a cut from any vendor, supplier or aggregator, because then the advice follows the commission.
Reviews and ads decide who appears first, not who runs the better event. Plan With YOLO has planned events since 2013 out of Pune and handles standalone casual dining, cafes and bakeries and family restaurants with a hall in Pune. Ask each name you shortlist for an itemised scope rather than one figure, and compare the same lines.
Look for a team that has already worked in Pune, because venue access, power and society timings are local knowledge and cost you a day to learn. Our office is in Anand Nagar off Sinhagad Road and the crew travels to Pune with its own kit. Send the date, the venue and a rough guest count and you get a scope back the same day.
There is no standard rate — the cost follows the guest count, the venue, how much décor and stage you want, and the date. A wedding date in season and a weekday corporate meeting in Pune are not comparable, so a quoted range before anyone has seen the brief is not worth much. You will get an itemised scope for your own event, and every line on it can move.
Pune · PCMC
Pune · PCMC
Pune · PCMC
Pune · PCMC
Pune · PCMC
Pune · PCMCPlanning events in Pune since 2013 — 500+ events for 100+ brands across 30+ cities. Read what clients say on Trustpilot, or find our Anand Nagar office on Google Maps.
Great EventGautam
User friendly experienceRahul Roushan
This company made sure to take care of everythingVaishnavi Todkar
Best Event Planner.Pranali Ladkat
Detailed workMolly Vernon
Brands, developers, manufacturers and engineering firms Plan With YOLO has run events for.
Logos are shown to say who the work was for. They do not imply endorsement or partnership.
Send us three months of sales.
Item-wise sales from your POS, your rent, and your last three wage sheets. That is enough to tell you where the money is going before you commit to anything.
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