Founder POV: Same Dish, Same Price, Different GP

This article is adapted from a LinkedIn post by Robbie Francis, Founder of Hops.

Two sites can run the same menu, sell the same dish at the same price, and still produce very different GP.
Most of the time, that gap is not pricing or recipe error. It is procurement reality.

The Core Problem

Recipes are costed against an ideal supplier product at an ideal price and pack size.
But live operations drift away from that ideal:

• one site buys in volume and gets better unit cost
• another site buys late or ad hoc and pays more

If you are not tracking actual site-level cost, the margin drift is hidden inside blended numbers.

What Operators Usually Do

A common failure pattern is overwriting delivered price to match expected price when receiving goods.
That makes order price and delivered price look identical, so variance disappears before anyone investigates.

What Needs to Change

1. Keep an ideal supplier baseline for planning GP.
2. Track actual cost per site at inventory-item level.
3. Preserve price variance at goods-received stage.
4. Review site-level ingredient deltas before month-end.

Founder POV

“You set the ideal, but you have to track the actual. Otherwise multi-site GP differences stay invisible until it is too late.”

Why This Matters

Department and site-level cost visibility turns “mystery GP” into actionable operations.
You can identify exactly which ingredients and purchasing behaviors are driving underperformance.

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About Robbie Francis
Robbie Francis is the Founder of Hops. He has spent years building and implementing hospitality technology with operators, focused on simplifying back-of-house operations across inventory and finance.

Follow Robbie on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbiefrancis

View the original LinkedIn post: 2 sites. Same dish. Same menu price. Completely different GP.