Food Costing That Earns CFO Sign-Off: What Great Looks Like
If you’ve ever presented a food cost report and braced for impact as it crossed your CFO’s desk, you’re not alone.
In most organizations, food costing is a constant source of friction. CFOs don’t trust the numbers. Chefs don’t trust the spreadsheets. Operators feel stuck in the middle. And the cycle continues month after month.
But here’s the truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.
The highest-performing foodservice teams — from single-unit operators to global enterprises — share one thing in common:
They’ve built food costing systems that finance actually believes.
Not “close enough.”
Not “we think this is right.”
Not “the spreadsheet did something weird this week.”
Real accuracy. Real alignment. Real confidence.
And that’s exactly what you’ll learn to build inside Galley’s new Free 5-Day Food Costing Email Education Course, delivered straight to your inbox (signup below).
Before you sign up, let’s walk through what “great” truly looks like — and what it takes to earn full CFO signoff.
Why CFOs Don’t Trust Most Food Costs (Even When the Team Works Hard)
Food costing isn’t broken because teams aren’t trying.
It’s broken because:
Vendor data arrives in different formats
Recipes include vague measurements
Pack sizes shift without warning
Substitutions aren’t tracked
Trim yield and cook loss aren’t documented
Spreadsheet formulas get overwritten
Waste isn’t measured in a consistent way
Demand forecasting gets replaced with guesswork
And when all those friction points stack up, the result is predictable:
your numbers don’t match finance’s numbers.
In the CFO’s world, inconsistency = inaccuracy.
And inaccuracy = risk.
What great teams do differently is not gather more data — they gather the right data, in the right format, built on a repeatable system that produces the same answer every time.
That’s the heart of food costing that earns CFO trust.
What “Great” Food Costing Looks Like
Below is a breakdown of the core attributes found in kitchens with CFO-approved costing models. If you benchmark your own systems against these, you’ll immediately see where gaps exist — and where to begin upgrading.
These pillars also map directly to the structure of the free 5-Day Food Costing Email Course, which teaches you how to implement each step correctly.
1. Vendor Data Is Loaded Cleanly — Every Time
The foundation of accurate costing is accurate purchasing data.
But kitchens often start with vendor data that is:
Misaligned
Inconsistently formatted
Missing pack size details
Conflicting across locations
Great kitchens do one simple thing exceptionally well:
they normalize vendor data before anything else happens.
That means:
One column format across all vendors
Verified pack size and unit conversions
No free-text measurement fields
No half-completed spreadsheets
No “just call the rep and ask what they meant”
When this step is standardized, everything downstream becomes dramatically easier — and more accurate.
This is exactly what you learn on Day 1 of the Food Costing Course.
2. Recipes Are Standardized, Yield-Corrected, and CFO-Readable
A finance leader doesn’t want to see:
“1 large onion”
“3 scoops of rice”
“½ hotel pan carrots”
“2 handfuls of cheese”
Even if everyone on your line knows exactly what that means.
Great kitchens translate culinary language into financial language by defining:
Raw weight vs. usable weight
Trim yields by ingredient
Cook loss percentages
Density conversions
Prep states (chopped, mirepoix, shredded, cooked, etc.)
True cost per usable unit
When recipes are built this way, the CFO suddenly sees:
1 large onion → 6.0 oz usable yield → $0.34 true cost
Not opinion.
Not estimation.
Not “it depends on who prepped it.”
Just math.
And math earns trust.
This is the focus of Day 2 of the Food Costing Course.
3. Recipe Costs Update Automatically When Vendor Prices Change
This is where most kitchens fall behind.
If your costing model requires manual updates every time a price changes:
it will fall out of date
it will drift from reality
it will erode CFO trust
Great teams build dynamic costing models where:
New vendor prices automatically roll up into ingredient costs
Ingredient costs automatically roll up into recipes
Recipes automatically roll up into menu categories
Menu categories roll up into contribution margin
This gives both culinary and finance a real-time view of profitability, without hours spent maintaining a spreadsheet.
This is what you learn on Day 3 of the Food Costing Course.
4. Waste and Overproduction Are Categorized and Quantified
Most kitchens measure waste only when it’s painful.
Great kitchens measure it as a discipline.
They categorize waste into four clear buckets:
Prep waste
Production waste
Service waste
Plate waste
They don’t stop at anecdotal observation (“we threw out a lot of broccoli”).
They measure ounces, pounds, and cost.
And they use that data to adjust:
Prep guides
Par levels
Menu engineering decisions
Staff training
Ordering patterns
This is where organizations routinely uncover 3–7% margin opportunity that was previously invisible.
Waste is addressed throughout the course, with frameworks and templates included.
5. Demand Forecasting Isn’t Guesswork — It’s Modeled
Most foodservice demand patterns aren’t random — they follow repeatable rhythms:
Day of week
Weather
Seasonality
Demographics
Events
Pay cycles
Location type
Great kitchens build forecasting models that integrate these signals to predict:
Cover counts
Batch sizes
Service patterns
Purchasing needs
This is how the best organizations avoid overproduction, prevent waste, and hit their budget without last-minute adjustments.
This is the focus of Day 4 of the Food Costing Course.
6. Budgets Are Built Like a CFO Would Build Them
The final step in great food costing is the ability to present your work in a way that a CFO immediately recognizes as credible.
That means:
Confidence bands (base, upside, downside)
Clear assumptions
Rolling allergen-inflation expectations
Sensitivity analysis around vendor changes
Scenario planning for volume shifts
Contribution margin by menu item
Variance analysis tied to operational decisions
When you can show your CFO a costing model that anticipates risk before it shows up in the P&L, your role shifts from “cost center” to strategic partner.
This is what you build on Day 5 of the Food Costing Course.
You Don’t Need More Spreadsheets — You Need a System
Great organizations aren’t great because they have better chefs or sharper accountants.
They’re great because they’ve aligned around a shared system that:
Reduces ambiguity
Eliminates silent errors
Connects teams
Speaks both culinary and financial language
Survives scale
And produces consistent truth
If your team is constantly firefighting food cost surprises, it’s not because your people aren’t working hard — it’s because the system they’re working within needs to evolve.
And that’s exactly what this free course teaches you how to do.
Ready to Build a Food Costing System Your CFO Will Actually Sign Off On?
You don’t need a 3-month bootcamp.
You don’t need new software tomorrow.
You need clarity, structure, and a repeatable model you can use across your entire operation.
That’s what you’ll get in Galley’s:
Free 5-Day Food Costing Email Education Course
Delivered daily to your inbox — short, actionable, and built for busy operators.
👇 Sign up here to get early access.
Learn the systems used at Google, Apple, and Comcast — taught by Nate Keller, former Google Executive Chef and Galley’s Director of Culinary Services.
Final Thought
The kitchens that win aren’t the ones with the best spreadsheets — they’re the ones with the best systems.
Systems that are trusted.
Systems that are understood.
Systems that hold up under CFO scrutiny.
Build that system now, in just five days — and watch how fast your organization moves from “fixing problems” to preventing them.
