Menu items overview

A menu item is a dish, drink or side you sell, linked to a recipe and a selling price. Rinvy uses it to work out food cost percentage, to compare the stock your sales should have used with what you counted, and to turn forecasted sales into ingredient needs. Linking menu items to recipes turns on four features:

• Food cost percentage for each item (recipe ingredient cost ÷ selling price).
• Food cost target alerts — Standard+ tier; flags items whose cost drifts above a target you set.
• Variance report — Standard+ tier; compares theoretical ingredient usage (sales × the recipe in use on each sales day) against actual consumption.
• Demand forecasting — Pro tier; predicts per-item sales and converts those into ingredient-level prep needs.

You can manage menu items even without enabling all of those features, but the value compounds once you do.

Three ways to add a menu item

The Add menu item form has a toggle at the top with three choices:

• New recipe — list what goes into one plate. Use it for any dish built from more than one thing. An ingredient can be a raw product or a prep item you make in-house, like a sauce or a dip.
• Existing recipe — sell one prep item as-is, like a loaf you bake ahead. You pick the prep recipe and a portion size. There is no ingredient list, so you can't add sides or toppings here.
• Combo — bundle menu items you already have into one POS item, like a hot dog and a drink.

If you aren't sure, choose New recipe. It covers every plated dish, including one built on a prep item.

Example: a plated dish built on a prep item

Your spinach dip prep recipe makes 8 quart of dip. You sell it as a plate with bread and cheese. To cost that plate:

1. Open Menu Items and tap Add menu item.
2. Choose New recipe.
3. Add three ingredients: 1 cup of Spinach Dip (the prep item), the bread, and the cheese.
4. Enter the name and the selling price, then save.

Rinvy prices the dip ingredient from its own recipe, so the plate's food cost includes the dip, the bread and the cheese. When the plate sells, Rinvy deducts one cup of dip stock, plus the bread and the cheese.

Fields on a menu item

1. Recipe (required) — the ingredients of one plate (New recipe), or the one prep recipe the item sells as-is (Existing recipe). A prep recipe on its own covers only that prep item. For a plate with more on it, use New recipe and add the prep item as an ingredient. See recipes overview.

2. Name (required) — the customer-facing name. Can differ from the recipe name.
3. Description (optional) — a one-liner for menus and receipts.

4. Selling price (required) — what the customer pays, in your kitchen's currency. Used as the denominator in food cost percentage. The currency is set under Kitchen Settings → Kitchen → Currency as a three-letter code from the ISO 4217 list, such as USD or CAD.

5. Menu category (optional) — Appetizers, Entrees, Desserts, etc. Used to group menu items in reports and on the menu items page.

6. Target food cost % (optional, Standard+ tier) — the percentage you want food cost to stay below. Drift alerts trigger when actual exceeds this.

7. Portion size (optional, default 1.000, Existing recipe only) — how much of the recipe's output product is consumed per sale.

Portion size

Most menu items consume one unit of the recipe output per sale. But sometimes one batch of a recipe serves multiple plates or one plate uses a fraction of a batch.

• Half-loaf sandwich: the recipe produces a full loaf; one sandwich uses 0.5.
• Half-dozen donut box: the recipe produces a single donut; one box sale uses 6.
• Dish that uses the whole batch: default 1.0.

Variance, forecast, food cost, and prep-list math all multiply expected sales by this value before computing ingredient demand.

How does Rinvy calculate a menu item's food cost?

Rinvy divides the recipe's ingredient cost by the selling price:

food cost % = recipe cost ÷ selling price

Recipe cost is the sum of the recipe's ingredient costs at their weighted-average cost from receipts. See how cost is computed.

Food cost percentage updates as receipts land — the same menu item's percentage moves as supplier prices change.

The dashboard's Food cost · wk card rolls this recipe-driven figure up across the week's sales. It's theoretical — what your recipes say the food should have cost at current ingredient prices — not the actual food cost from counts and purchases. Actual food cost follows the cost of goods sold method in IRS Publication 334: beginning inventory plus purchases, minus ending inventory. For that number, see the Food Cost report.

Inline vs output-producing recipes

A menu item can point at either kind of recipe:

• Output-producing recipe (Existing recipe). Selling the item consumes a portion of one prepped output (and the prep step deducted ingredients separately). Example: a loaf of bread you bake ahead and sell whole.
• Inline recipe (New recipe). Selling the item deducts each ingredient directly. An ingredient can be raw (a patty, a bun) or a prep item (marinara, prepared dough). Examples: a burger, a marinara pasta dish, a margherita pizza on prepared dough.

Both are fully supported. If the plate has anything besides the one prep item, use an inline recipe.

Archiving a menu item

Use the On the menu toggle in the edit modal (or swipe the row on mobile) to archive a menu item. Archiving is for seasonal items, retired specials, and weekend-only dishes — anything you want off the menu without erasing what it did while it was on.

An archived menu item stops driving anything forward-looking:

• Demand forecasts skip it.
• The order list's Sales expectation mode orders nothing for it.
• Prep list generation ignores it.
• Food cost drift alerts stop firing for it.
• The combo editor won't take it as a new component.

A combo that already contains it is the exception, and deliberately so: the combo is still on the menu, so it's still selling, and Rinvy keeps ordering and prepping its components — archived or not. You can still edit that combo normally; the archived component stays in its Combo components list, flagged (archived).

An archived item's history is untouched. Variance, sales depletion, the menu item report, forecast accuracy scoring, and cost calculations all still see it — so a combo that already contains an archived component keeps costing correctly, and last quarter's numbers don't change.

The Menu page splits the list into Active and Archived chips; restoring an item is the same toggle in reverse.

Related

• Food cost targets and drift alerts
• Recipes overview
• Create a recipe