Pick where it hurts most — or let’s start with a full assessment.

A restaurant consultant finds where a business is losing money and fixes the causes worth fixing. In practice that means auditing vendor invoices against market pricing, costing every menu item by contribution margin, walking the floor open to close to find workflow and staffing losses, and building the systems that keep the fixes in place. At MarginSurge every engagement starts the same way: we look at your numbers and your floor before we recommend anything.

Our consulting engagements are scoped and quoted after a free 20-minute consult, because the work varies with the size of the operation and what is actually broken. There is no standard hourly rate. If you want something concrete without talking to anyone first, our Restaurant Menu Optimization Report is $19.95.

The most commonly cited benchmark is 28 to 35 percent of food sales, with prime cost (food plus labor combined) generally targeted under about 60 percent for full service. Treat those as reference points, not targets. A steakhouse and a pizzeria have legitimately different numbers, and a high food cost paired with high volume can outperform a low one. What matters more is whether your percentage is drifting month over month, and which specific items are dragging it.

Four places to look before touching a price. First, vendor invoices: pack size changes, missed rebates, and quiet case-price increases are the most common and the easiest to recover. Second, item-level margin: your top seller often has the worst contribution margin, and small recipe or portioning changes move the number more than a price increase would. Third, prep consistency: a prep list executed three different ways is a yield loss that never shows up on an invoice. Fourth, waste and over-ordering against actual daypart demand. Our Food and Beverage Vendor Audit and menu engineering work target the first two directly.

Yes. Our Food and Beverage Vendor Audit reviews your invoices line by line against real market pricing, identifies pack-size discrepancies, missed rebates, and above-market items, and hands you a negotiation brief with defensible targets for each vendor. It applies to any broadline distributor: Sysco, US Foods, Performance Foodservice, or Gordon Food Service. Our guide to restaurant food distributors covers how the four compare on minimums and terms.

Yes. We are based in Los Angeles and Phoenix and work on-site in both markets, and we work remotely with restaurants across the US. Engagements that need a floor walkthrough are scoped around travel during the free consult.

Sometimes, and often not yet. The answer depends on your floor plan, your labor rates, and your ticket volume. A robot that pays back in 14 months in one dining room will not pay back at all in another. We have worked inside this category at Bear Robotics and Newo AI, and our analysis includes a payback model on your actual labor rates plus a straight answer, including not yet. Our guide to restaurant service robots compares six models on price and ROI.

It depends more on contract terms than features. Most modern POS systems do the same core things, and the expensive differences are in processing rates, contract length, and what happens when you want to leave. Our guide to restaurant POS systems compares seven platforms on startup fit, pricing clarity, contract terms, and support, with a named top pick for new restaurants.

Yes. Pre-opening project management, concept development, feasibility studies, business plans, and kitchen design and equipment planning are all part of our work, in both Los Angeles and Phoenix. Opening work is scoped as a custom project after a free consult.

It is a conversation about where your restaurant is losing time, money, or both. No pitch. If there is a fit, we scope the work from there. If there is not, we will say so.