Plate Margin turns one recipe entry into true plate costs, smart ordering, and prep lists that build themselves — built by a chef, for chefs.
3 days free · then $5/month · cancel anytime
One recipe entry powers costing, recipe books, scaling, prep, ordering, menu analysis and kitchen controls. Change a dish once and the connected tools update with it.
Type an ingredient and Plate Margin suggests it by name and supplier together — cheapest option first — drawn from every price ever entered in the kitchen, plus a worldwide distributor directory for names it hasn't seen yet. Cost per kilogram (or pound) calculates and is remembered automatically, one correction at a time, so pricing gets faster and more accurate the more it's used.
Upload a sales report and every dish is classified — Star, Crowd-Pleaser, Hidden Gem, or Rethink — on profit versus popularity. Full costing detail sits beneath every rating, so the reasoning is never a black box.
Par levels aren't guesswork. Plate Margin combines your sales history with this week's actual bookings — covers, events, function numbers — to scale ordering quantities up or down automatically, week to week.
Every element of every dish, organised by section, with a full Monday-to-Sunday grid to tick or annotate as prep is completed. Print one section or the whole kitchen, on paper or on a phone at the bench.
Any supplier, anywhere in the world — paste a link and its logo resolves automatically, or let Plate Margin suggest major distributors for your region. Par levels calculate in kilograms (or pounds), each ingredient shows its cheapest known supplier and price, and estimated weekly spend is ready before a single order goes out — with anything unpriced flagged plainly for a manual check.
Every menu belongs to a venue. Switch outlets and recipes, prep lists, ordering lists, and the matrix all recalibrate instantly to that location — with saved menus, ordering lists, and prep lists grouped cleanly by venue across the whole group.
Plate Margin now includes the tools chefs use during planning, prep, service and team management — all tied to the active menu.
Every selected menu builds its own clean recipe book automatically, complete with a table of contents, organised recipe pages, ingredient quantities and full methods.
Choose a dish, enter the number of guests, and Plate Margin rewrites the complete recipe with the ingredient quantities required for that exact yield.
Tag recipes once and automatically create a menu-wide matrix covering dietary requirements and major allergens for kitchen reference and printing.
Record waste, overproduction, spoilage and excess stock, then see the operational and cost impact instead of letting losses disappear unnoticed.
Log equipment faults and building issues by venue, assign priority and status, record notes, and keep unresolved kitchen problems visible.
Kitchen owners can invite managers, chefs and staff into the shared kitchen. Team members use their own login while the subscribed owner controls access.
Plate Margin was designed around a simple constraint: a single-site café and a twelve-venue group need the same accuracy, organised differently. The platform adapts to both without extra setup.
Assign every menu to a venue once. From there, every saved ordering list and every saved prep list is automatically grouped under its outlet — no folders to maintain, no naming conventions to enforce across a team.
Sales history sets the baseline. Weekly bookings — including known events and function numbers — adjust it in real time. The result is a par level that reflects the week actually in front of you, not an average of the last six months.
Retire a menu without losing it. Every past menu, ordering list, and prep list remains fully accessible, so a group can compare this winter's ordering against last winter's in seconds.