Ranked shortlists
The right answer is different for a truck and for a group.
Six segments, six rankings, six options in each — the three vendors whose facts we can verify publicly, a spreadsheet, your POS, and us. A spreadsheet is first in one of these lists and last in another, and both of those are the honest answer for that reader.
food trucks
For most food trucks the right answer is a spreadsheet, not software. An eight-item menu with a handful of suppliers can be costed on one sheet in an afternoon and re-checked monthly. Software starts earning its money at a second truck, a commissary, or a menu that changes with the pitch.
Ranked first: A spreadsheet
See the ranking →
cafés and coffee shops
Start with the POS you already pay for — most café POS tiers include item-level costing, and a café's drink menu is short enough to maintain there. Move to dedicated software when the milk mix, the pastry counter or the bean price start moving faster than you can re-enter them.
Ranked first: Your POS's built-in reporting
See the ranking →
bars and pubs
For a bar, inventory software beats costing software. Pour cost is a variance problem — the gap between what your recipes say you poured and what actually left the bottles — and no amount of recipe costing closes it. Count weekly, or the number is fiction.
Ranked first: MarketMan
See the ranking →
pizzerias
A pizzeria's cost problem is one ingredient. Cheese is roughly half the food cost of a pie, it moves with the dairy market, and it is portioned by hand hundreds of times a night. Pick the tool that recosts when the cheese price moves — or a spreadsheet, if you will genuinely check monthly.
Ranked first: Marji
See the ranking →
single-location independents
For one independent restaurant the honest shortlist is short: a tool that recosts your dishes from invoices, or a spreadsheet you will genuinely maintain. The platforms below are excellent and priced for operations with a bookkeeper or a finance team, which a single location usually is not.
Ranked first: Marji
See the ranking →
multi-unit groups
At several locations the platforms earn their price. A group has a finance function, a bookkeeper and enough invoice volume that automation pays — which is exactly the operation an all-in-one platform or a back-office tool is built for. This is the one segment where a spreadsheet is genuinely the wrong answer.
Ranked first: Restaurant365
See the ranking →
Where everything ranks, in one grid
This is the fastest way to audit us. If our column were a row of ones, these pages would be an advert with a numbered list. It isn't: Marjiis fourth for bars, because bar cost control is a counting problem and we do not count, and fourth for groups, because a group's constraints are accounting and labour rather than menu margin.
| Option | food trucks | cafés and coffee shops | bars and pubs | pizzerias | single-location independents | multi-unit groups |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marjius | 3 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| MarginEdge | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 |
| MarketMan | 4 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
| Restaurant365 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 1 |
| A spreadsheet | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
| Your POS's built-in reporting | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 |
Lower is better. Positions are read directly from the six lists, so this grid cannot disagree with the pages it summarises. Every list includes both non-software options because for several of these readers they are the right answer.
Why only six options
Because we only list a vendor whose pricing and positioning we can check on their own public pages, with the date we checked it printed. That rule keeps this to three vendors rather than a directory of forty logos, and it is the same rule behind the comparison hub, where each of those three gets a head-to-head and a shortlist of its own.
The other two options are not software at all. A spreadsheet and the reporting already included with your POS are the honest first checks for a lot of operators, and a list that omits them to make the paid options look inevitable is not a list worth reading. What we do and do not connect to is set out on the integrations page.
If you want the cost structure behind the segment rather than the software for it, food cost by cuisine costs one real plate for each of eleven formats.