Price creep
Price creep is a series of small supplier increases — 2% here, 3% there — none of which is worth a phone call and which compound into a serious margin problem. Twelve monthly increases of 1.5% is 19.6% over a year on an item nobody ever flagged.
Worked example · Eighteen months on one item
- Starting price
- $8.40/lb
- Average increase per delivery cycle
- +1.2%
- Delivery cycles
- 18
- Ending price
- $10.41/lb
- Dish using 6 oz, sold 180/week
- cost +$0.75/plate
- Annual margin impact, one dish
- $7,020
No single increase would have triggered a conversation. The cumulative one is a line cook's wages.
The two checks that catch it
- Compare unit price to the same item 90 days ago, not to last week. Creep is invisible at one-week resolution and obvious at ninety.
- Set a threshold and let it alert you. Any item up more than 8% in a quarter gets looked at. A rule with a number in it is the only version of this that survives a busy month.
Worth separating from market movement: when a commodity genuinely moves, every supplier moves with it and the answer is repricing the dish, not changing vendors. When one vendor drifts and the market didn't, that's a conversation. Our food cost index exists to tell those two cases apart.
Every invoice line, compared to the last one automatically.
Marji reads your invoices, tracks unit price per item over time, and tells you which dishes crossed your margin target because of it.
Try it free →The guide that works it through
Why Is My Food Cost So High? A Diagnostic
Seven causes of a high restaurant food cost, in the order they're usually the answer — with the check that confirms or eliminates each one in under an hour.
Related terms
Invoice reconciliation
Checking that what you ordered, what arrived, and what you were billed are the same three things.
Bid sheet
A side-by-side comparison of the same items across suppliers, normalised to a comparable unit price.
Case price vs. unit price
Suppliers quote cases; recipes need units. Comparing vendors on case price alone hides which one is actually cheaper.
Commodity index
A tracked measure of what a food commodity costs nationally — the benchmark that separates a market move from a vendor move.
CPI: food away from home
The government measure of restaurant menu price inflation — what everyone else's prices are doing.