Service

What does SHTROM Creative's restaurant consulting service include?

Turning what already works at one location into a system that can be copied to the next — recipes, SOPs, and AI-assisted tools built to help restaurants expand faster without losing what made the first location work.

Built to be copied, not just written down

Opening a second location means more than duplicating a menu. The recipes, the standard operating procedures, and the way the kitchen actually runs need to exist as a real system — something a new team can pick up and run, not something that only lives in one person's head.

AI-assisted recipe and SOP management

We build tools to manage recipes and SOPs so they stay consistent, searchable, and easy to hand off — using AI to keep them organized and up to date as the menu and the team change.

A system for expansion, not a binder on a shelf

The goal is a system that helps a restaurant open its next location faster, not a document nobody opens. Consistency at scale starts with the systems behind the food, not just the marketing in front of it.

A consultant and a chef reviewing a tablet showing a recipe checklist together in a restaurant kitchen.

Turning what works at one location into a system for the next.

What you get

SOP Documentation
Turning how the kitchen actually runs into a real, repeatable process.
Recipe Management Systems
AI-assisted tools to keep recipes consistent, organized, and easy to hand off.
Expansion Systems
A copy-paste system built to help a restaurant open its next location faster.

A busy restaurant can still lose money because revenue and profit are different things. Sales must cover food, labor, rent, card fees, delivery commissions, waste and discounts before anything reaches the owner. When a full dining room produces no profit, the cause is usually prime cost rather than traffic. Start with food cost, labor cost and inventory variance.

How to Increase Restaurant Profit Without Getting More Customers

You can raise restaurant profit without adding a single guest by making more money from the sales you already have. The levers are recipe costing, portion control, vendor pricing, menu engineering, forecast-based scheduling, waste tracking and comp control. On thin margins, a few points of improvement in food and labor efficiency often moves the bottom line more than a marketing push.

Where Restaurants Quietly Lose Thousands of Dollars Every Month

Restaurants rarely lose money in one large, obvious place. They lose it in small leaks that repeat hundreds of times a month: over-portioning, free add-ons, unrecorded waste, uncaught vendor increases, spoilage, comps, unnecessary overtime, forgotten subscriptions and delivery commissions. A mistake worth forty cents, made four hundred times, is sixteen hundred dollars a month.

Your Food Cost Is Too High. Here's Where to Look First.

When food cost is too high, raising menu prices is rarely the first fix. Start by comparing theoretical food cost, which is what your recipes say you should have spent, against actual food cost, which is what you really spent. The gap between them points at portioning, yields, purchasing, waste, spoilage, POS recipe errors, employee meals or counting.

What Should Food Cost Percentage Be for a Restaurant?

There is no single correct food cost percentage. The right target depends on your concept, your product mix, your labor model and your price point. A pizzeria and a steakhouse should not aim for the same number. What matters more than the percentage is contribution in dollars, since a high food cost item that sells constantly can be worth more than a cheap one nobody orders.

Why Your Restaurant Labor Cost Keeps Climbing

Wage increases explain only part of a rising labor cost. The rest usually comes from scheduling by intuition instead of forecast, overstaffing slow shifts, avoidable overtime, poor station design, prep hours nobody questions, long closes and a team that cannot cover each other. Track labor dollars alongside labor percentage: the percentage can look healthy while the dollars climb.

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