🎃 Food Costing Doesn’t Have to Be Scary 👻

Your food cost report shouldn’t be as frightening as a Stephen King novel.

October is full of spooky surprises wherever you look. But few things make a chef or operator shudder like discovering a food cost that’s five points higher than expected.

Hidden costs creep in. Vendor prices mutate overnight. A spreadsheet formula fractures, and, suddenly, your P&L has the makings of a true horror movie. But the twist in this tale is a good one: Food costing doesn’t have to be scary. With the right system in place, food costing turns out to be, not the villain, but the hero of the tale as one of the most empowering tools in your kitchen.

To find out all about how this story goes, all you have to do is enroll in Galley’s free 5-Day Food Costing Email Course,“How to Build Enterprise-Grade Costing Models Ready for CFO Sign-Off.” It’s taught by Nate Keller—the former Executive Chef of Google—and it’s designed to help chefs, operators, and CFOs finally learn not to fear the numbers that matter most.

👻 The Real Killers in the Kitchen

Every operator has faced one (or all) of these nightmares scenarios:

• Ghost Ingredients – Items that appear in recipes but never get ordered.
  

• Phantom Margins – Food costs that drift a few percentage points every month without explanation.
  

• Spreadsheet Zombies – Formulas that refuse to die, even after multiple “fixes.”
  

• The Monster Under the Spreadsheet – That one mystery cell throwing everything off.
  
  
  

The problem isn’t you—it’s the system. Most foodservice organizations still rely on static spreadsheets, vendor PDFs, and guesswork. These tools were never designed for multi-location, high-volume operations.

That means even small mistakes—say, a $0.50 error on a case cost or a missing trim yield—can balloon into six-figure losses.

At Google HQ, for example, an ounce of avocado trim waste added up to more than a full chef’s salary each year.

So, yes, bad data can be frightening. But that also means the fixes are measurable and achievable.

🔦 Turn on the Lights: A Better Way to Cost

When your food costing system works, it becomes your superpower.

You can see the ripple effects of vendor swings in real time. You can model waste, demand, and seasonality with confidence. And you can hand your CFO a forecast that actually earns a nod of approval instead of a skeptical eyebrow.

That’s what the 5-Day Food Costing Email Course helps you build—step by step.

🧙‍♂️ What You’ll Learn (in Just 10 Minutes a Day)

This free email course distills years of enterprise experience into short, actionable lessons you can actually use.

Each day builds on the one before—and by the end of the week, you’ll have the framework for a food costing system your CFO actually trusts.

Day 1: Load Vendor Items Right

Start with clean data. You’ll import and normalize vendor items using templates that eliminate the silent errors caused by pack-size confusion.

Day 2: Standardize Recipes & Yields

Turn “one large onion” into a precise, yield-based spec your CFO can sign off on. Learn to track trim, cook loss, and density conversions the right way.

Day 3: Prepare Dynamic Costing

Make your recipe costs automatically roll up when vendor prices change. No more manual updates, no more surprises.

Day 4: Forecast Demand & Engineer Your Menu

Predict demand by day, location, and season—and finally connect your menu mix to your waste tracking.

Day 5: Build CFO-Level Budgets & Scenarios

Tie everything together. Build budgets with confidence bands and present data that earns you a seat at the strategic table.

🧰 What You’ll Get (Free Resources Included)

Along with the daily lessons, you’ll receive the exact templates and frameworks used in high-volume operations such as Google, Apple, and Comcast:

• Vendor CSV Import Templates – formatted perfectly to avoid column chaos.
  

• Yield & Density Checklists – covering trim %, cooking %, and conversions.
  

• Waste Logs – broken into prep, production, service, and plate waste.
  

• Menu Mix Frameworks – to pinpoint which dishes actually drive your P&L.
  

• Forecasting Models – to plan for seasonality, events, and location variability.
  

• Cost-to-Budget Templates – with base, upside, and downside scenario planning.
  

Everything you need to move from haunted spreadsheets to healthy margins.

🩸 Why Now?

Margins are tighter than ever. Ingredient prices are unpredictable. And CFOs are asking tougher questions.

If your food costing system isn’t airtight, those phantom margins can become real financial pain—especially when scaling across multiple sites or service models.

So what if, instead of defending your numbers, you could lead with them? What if your CFO saw your reports and said, “Finally—someone who gets it”?

That’s what happens when you move from spreadsheets to structured systems. And it starts with understanding how to connect the dots between your recipes, vendors, and budgets.

🕸️ Stop Letting Hidden Costs Haunt Your Margins

There’s a saying at Galley: “You can’t fix what you can’t see.”

That’s why visibility is at the core of everything we teach—from yield tracking to demand forecasting. When you can see your data clearly, you can finally take control of your food costs.

So this Halloween, instead of being haunted by hidden costs, let’s bust those spooks.

Let’s build a system that’s simple, scalable, and transparent. One that not only helps you sleep at night—but also helps your CFO sleep, too. And with no nightmares.

🧡 Ready to Cost with Confidence?

Food costing shouldn’t feel like a monster in the closet.
It should feel like a skill — one that makes you a stronger leader, smarter operator, and better business partner. So why not join thousands of chefs, operators, and CFOs who are learning to build food costing systems that stand up to scrutiny and scale with success.

🎃 Enroll for Early Access

The 5-Day Food Costing Email Course
Build a Food Costing System Your CFO Actually Trusts—Without Phantom Margins or $0.50 Errors That Scale to $100K Losses.

Final Thought

Mastering food costing isn’t about becoming an accountant. It’s about owning your numbers and transforming them from something scary into something supportive.

Because when you finally understand what’s behind your margins…you realize the only thing you ever needed to fear was bad data.