Free Workshop · September 1 – September 28, 2026
COGS Workshop
Four weeks to find exactly which menu items are draining your margin, and fix at least one of them for good. Bring your recipes and a month of invoices.
Already started? You can still join through Day 14 and catch up.
How much more profit is hiding in your menu?
A monthly COGS percentage can tell you there’s a problem. It can’t tell you which menu item is eating into your margin, which ingredients deserve your attention, or which change will make the biggest difference.
That’s what this COGS Workshop is built to uncover.
Over four weeks, you’ll walk through The Recipe Reckoning framework and turn your food cost numbers into a practical system for finding opportunities, making better decisions, and keeping more of every sale, one manageable weekday at a time.
What the four weeks look like
- Week 1: Know what it really costs. Fully cost one menu item, recipe, cup, lid and all, and see the actual margin behind what you sell.
- Week 2: Find where the money is going. Rank your ingredient spending so the biggest opportunities rise to the top instead of trying to trim pennies everywhere.
- Week 3: Find a better option. Work through five practical ways to lower costs, from supplier negotiations and price comparisons to alternate products and make-or-buy decisions.
- Week 4: Turn savings into a system. Make a change, measure the result, set your next target, and build a simple monthly rhythm for doing it again.
What you walk out with
- A fully costed recipe and a process you can repeat across your menu
- A clear view of which ingredients have the biggest impact on your food cost
- At least one concrete opportunity to improve your profit
- A repeatable system for finding the next opportunity instead of waiting for COGS to surprise you
- More confidence that pricing, purchasing, and recipe decisions are helping the business
Who it’s for
This workshop is for independent QSR and fast-casual owners and operators who want better profits without blindly raising prices or cutting quality.
If food costs feel harder to control than they should, this workshop will help you see where the biggest opportunities are and what to do about them.
Plan on about 20 to 30 minutes each weekday, with weekends off. Full access to The Recipe Reckoning course is included for the duration of the workshop.
Access: All members. Free to join.
Included while the Workshop runs
The Recipe Reckoning
Stop guessing which menu items are costing you. The Recipe Reckoning gives independent coffee shop owners a simple repeatable loop to find…
Included during the Workshop — access ends September 28, 2026. Academy Plus members keep it permanently.
Free gets the transformation
- ✓ Every core Workshop activity, ~30 min per weekday
- ✓ Temporary access to the included course
- ✓ Weekday accountability emails, at the time you choose
- ✓ Community participation and Q&A
- ✓ Progress tracking, check-ins, and completion rewards
Plus adds depth & access
Everything that gets you the result is open to every member. Plus adds depth, access and permanence.
- Weekly AMA with the instructor. Ask about your suppliers, your conversions, your recipes. Plus members get access to AMA replays, too.
- Benchmarks by category. Where your cost of goods sits against comparable shops.
- Keep the course. The Recipe Reckoning stays in your library after the workshop ends rather than expiring with the access window.
- The full Workshop Library, including reopening this workshop self guided any time you want to run it again.