Building Menu Book: Our Journey Begins

Running a food service business is tough. Between managing staff, keeping customers happy, and maintaining quality, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your pricing is right.

But here's the reality: if you don't know your costs, you can't know your margins. And if you don't know your margins, you're flying blind.

The Problem with Spreadsheets

Most cafes, restaurants, and food service operators manage their recipe costs in spreadsheets. We know because we did it too at GoBowling Shipley Lanes.

The problems quickly pile up:

Manual calculations that break when you change one cell
No sub-recipe support – if your pizza sauce changes, you have to update every pizza recipe manually
Unit conversion headaches – buying in kilos, using in grams, costing by portion
VAT confusion – are prices ex-VAT or inc-VAT? Different for purchases vs sales
Version control nightmares – which spreadsheet is the current one?

After one too many pricing mistakes, we decided there had to be a better way.

What Makes Menu Book Different

We're building Menu Book to solve the problems we actually face:

1. Recursive Cost Calculation

Your pizza sauce is a recipe. Your margherita pizza uses that sauce. When the cost of tomatoes goes up, Menu Book automatically recalculates the sauce cost, then the pizza cost. No manual updates.

2. Smart VAT Handling

Menu Book knows that ingredient purchase prices might include VAT, but margins should be calculated ex-VAT. Sell prices can be VAT-eligible or not. It handles all the complexity so you don't have to think about it.

3. Unit Conversion That Just Works

Buy flour in 16kg bags, use it in 250g portions. Buy milk in litres, use it in millilitres. Menu Book converts everything automatically using standard units.

4. Git-Friendly Data

Your recipes are stored as YAML files, not locked in a database. Version control them with git, share them with your team, back them up anywhere.

5. CLI + Web UI

Power users get a fast CLI for bulk operations. Everyone else gets a beautiful web interface. Same data, different interfaces.

Building in Public

We're building Menu Book in the open because:

Accountability – Telling you what we're building keeps us focused
Feedback – Your input shapes what features we prioritize
Transparency – You can see our progress, not just marketing fluff
Community – We're not the only ones solving these problems

What's Next

Over the coming weeks, we'll be sharing:

Deep dives into specific features (VAT handling, unit conversions, etc.)
Technical challenges we're solving
Design decisions and why we made them
Customer stories (once we have customers!)

If you're interested in following along, join our waitlist to get updates when we launch.

Questions?

We'd love to hear from you. What recipe costing problems are you facing? What features would make Menu Book useful for your business?

Email us at [email protected] or [email protected].

This is post #1 in our "Building in Public" series. Follow along as we build Menu Book from the ground up.