Most restaurants calculate food cost using Opening Stock + Purchases − Closing Stock. That tells you what you spent. It tells you nothing about why — and nothing about how to fix it. Portion IQ fixes the formula first.
Opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock gives you a total spend figure. It's a financial accounting number. It does not tell you where the money went, which items are leaking, or how to reduce cost next month.
You can track that number perfectly for years and still not know why your food cost is high — because you're measuring the outcome, not the cause.
Every protein, vegetable, and dairy item has a yield percentage — how much usable product you actually get after trimming, cooking, and portioning. Almost no independent restaurant in the UAE accounts for this correctly.
If you're costing a dish based on raw purchase weight, your cost per plate is wrong. Your menu price is wrong. And your margin is wrong — often by 15–30%.
Portion IQ runs yield tests on your actual ingredients in your kitchen. We cost every dish on what actually lands on the plate — not what the supplier invoice says.
Most menus have 30–60 items. But 80% of your food cost comes from your top 10–15 sellers. That's the Pareto principle applied to your kitchen — and it's where Portion IQ starts.
We identify your highest-volume items, run yield tests specifically on those, and build precise costing frameworks around them. Fast, focused impact — before we systematise the rest.
And critically: we don't apply the same method to every dish. A slow-cooked item has different yield dynamics than a grilled one. A sauce-heavy dish has different portion variance than a dry item. We build a framework that fits each category.
Right now, the cost of your dishes varies every service — not because of ingredient prices, but because of how they're prepared. Different hands, different portions, different yields. The dish costs a different amount every single day.
Standardisation means one way to make every dish. One portion weight. One prep process. One outcome. Not because you're running a factory — but because predictability is how you protect your margin without policing your team every shift.
Most UAE restaurants have no purchasing structure. The chef checks the walk-in, makes a call, and orders what feels right. Some weeks you over-buy and throw product away. Other weeks you run out of your best-selling dish on a Friday night.
Both are expensive. Both are avoidable. Portion IQ builds a demand-based ordering model from your actual sales history — so purchasing is driven by what your customers ordered last week, not by what your chef remembers.
The result: lower over-purchasing, less expiry loss, fewer stock-outs, and a purchasing cycle your team can follow without the chef being the gatekeeper.
We audit your top 20 items, run yield tests, and map the gap between what you spent and what you should have spent. 7-day turnaround.
Recipe cards, portion weights, prep SOPs, and visual guides — built for your kitchen, your team, and your menu categories.
We train your team on-site. Every station gets the tools, templates, and process to execute consistently from day one.
Weekly variance tracking, purchasing reviews, and menu profitability reports — so you see the impact and catch drift before it becomes loss.
We analyse your top 20 items, run yield checks, review your purchasing patterns, and map the gap between what you spent and what you should have spent. You get a written report. No obligation to continue.
We've run this diagnosis across restaurants in the UAE. In almost every case, the losses are significantly more — because the equation has been wrong from the start. Fixing it doesn't require a big budget. It requires the right method.
Book Your Profit Diagnosis →