The Kitchen Margin Pack
Three cost increases landed on UK hospitality in the same month and not one of them has gone away.
The National Living Wage moved to £12.71 an hour on the 1st of April 2026. The first business rates revaluation since before the pandemic took effect at the same time, based on 2024 property values. And food inflation, which most operators had budgeted at three or four per cent, was revised sharply upward on the back of supply chain and energy disruption.
If you are running a kitchen right now I do not need to tell you what that feels like. You are watching the invoices climb. You are watching the wage bill climb. And you are watching the gap between the two close on the margin you used to have, a little more each month, with no single moment you can point at and no obvious thing to cut. That grinds people down.
I have been in hospitality for 35 years. I have worked through recessions, foot-and-mouth, the smoking ban and COVID. I have watched kitchens I trained in close their doors. Good operators. Talented people who cared about the food. They did not lose those businesses because they were bad at the job.
Here is what I have seen every single time. The businesses that come out the other side are not always the best ones. They are not always in the best locations, serving the best food or employing the most talented teams. They are the ones who know their numbers.
Not roughly. Not a food cost percentage half remembered from a conversation two years ago. Dish by dish, supplier by supplier, week by week.
That is what this pack is for.
The Kitchen Margin Pack, six working tools
Eleven pages. Print them, put them where the work happens and fill them in with a pen.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Recipe Costing Sheet | Cost any dish properly and find the minimum selling price below which your GP stops working |
| GP and Labour Target Card | The benchmark ranges for your sector on one page, food and labour, with what to watch in each |
| Invoice Audit Checklist | Two to three hours on your last four weeks of invoices. It usually finds money |
| Product Specification Template | Stop buying on price alone and make your costings reliable again |
| Stock Count and Delivery Check | Catch the waste that never reaches the bin, which costs more than the waste that does |
| Labour Cost Tracker | Four weeks on one page, so you can see the trend rather than the headline |
Eight of the eleven pages are tools. The others are a cover, a page telling you where to start and a last page with my details. There is nothing else in it.
What it costs
Nothing. Put your email address in below and the download appears on this page.
One thing you have to do
The confirmation email is not optional. Signing up sends you a link and the pack does not unlock until you click it. Check your inbox now. Check the spam folder if it is not there within a couple of minutes. People miss this step and then wonder why nothing arrived.
After that you get the weekly recipe and the occasional piece on running a kitchen profitably. One email, once a week. You can leave whenever you want.