Strategy & Planning

How to run a pricing analysis as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You set your menu prices two years ago based on what felt right and what the place down the street was charging. Since then, food costs have climbed, your prime rib plate is underwater, and your happy hour well drinks are driving covers but killing margin. You know this somewhere in your gut, but proving it means exporting a CSV from Square or Toast, matching it against MarginEdge or your food cost spreadsheet, and doing math you don't have time to do on a Tuesday night after a 12-hour shift. By the time you have a clear picture, it's three weeks old and the purveyor already raised egg prices again. You're making pricing decisions on instinct when the data is sitting right there, siloed and untranslated.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live pricing dashboard that shows your actual margin per menu category — food, cocktails, wine, modifiers — updated from your bank feed and transaction history, not a spreadsheet you forget to refresh.

An automated weekly digest that flags which items are dragging margin below your threshold and which price changes from the last 90 days actually moved the needle on revenue per cover.

A side-by-side scenario model that shows you what happens to monthly runway if you raise your pasta entrees $2, cut your well-drink happy hour by one hour, or add a $5 cover charge on Fridays — before you touch the menu.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Scenario Analysis Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Transaction Insights and Scenario Analysis connect to Plaid (scheduled sync — Starch syncs your bank transaction data on a schedule) and Stripe (scheduled sync — Starch connects directly to Stripe for charges and payout data). Growth Analyst connects to Stripe from Starch's integration catalog for revenue trend data. If your POS system (Toast, Square) or food cost tool (MarginEdge, Restaurant365) has a web portal, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull cost data directly into your analysis.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank accounts and build me a spending dashboard that shows my top 15 food and beverage vendor payments month-over-month for the last six months, flags any vendor where I paid more than 20% above my average this month, and groups charges by category: produce, protein, dairy, alcohol, dry goods.

Using my Plaid and Stripe data, build me a scenario model that shows my current monthly burn and net margin, then lets me test three pricing scenarios: raising all entrees $2, raising only protein-heavy dishes $3, and cutting happy hour from 5–8pm to 5–7pm. Show me the projected change in monthly revenue and runway for each.

Pull my Stripe sales data and send me a weekly email every Monday at 7am that summarizes: total revenue by category (food vs. bar), average revenue per cover versus last week, which days had the highest and lowest revenue, and one specific pricing or scheduling change I should consider based on what the numbers show.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your Plaid bank accounts in Starch — Starch syncs your transaction data on a schedule, so every vendor payment, ACH, and deposit is pulled automatically. This is the foundation of your food cost and spending picture.

2 Connect Stripe if you use it for payment processing or online ordering — Starch connects directly to Stripe and syncs charges, daily payouts, and revenue by item category so you can see actual sales volume, not just deposits.

3 Open Transaction Insights and type: 'Show me my top 20 vendor payments over the last 90 days, grouped by food category (produce, protein, dairy, alcohol), with month-over-month change for each.' Starch builds the view in plain English output — no pivot table required.

4 Identify your three to five highest-spend categories from that view. For each one, note whether you've raised menu prices on the corresponding items in the past 12 months. This is the gap between your cost reality and your menu reality.

5 If your food cost tracking lives in MarginEdge, Restaurant365, or a spreadsheet on Google Drive, tell Starch: 'Go to my MarginEdge account and pull my actual vs. theoretical food cost percentages by category for the last three periods.' Starch automates that through your browser — no API needed.

6 Open Scenario Analysis and tell Starch: 'My baseline is current Stripe revenue and Plaid burn. Build me three scenarios: raise all protein dishes $2.50, raise all pasta and grain dishes $1.50, or add a $4 weekend surcharge Friday and Saturday. Show me projected monthly revenue change and how each scenario affects my 12-month runway.'

7 Review the scenario outputs. Scenario Analysis shows you runway, burn rate, and break-even for each pricing assumption so you're comparing real financial consequences — not guessing which change feels safer.

8 Set up Growth Analyst to send you a Monday morning email digest. Tell it: 'Every Monday at 7am, email me Stripe revenue for the prior week broken down by food vs. bar, average daily revenue, the two highest-revenue days and what made them different, and one pricing or menu recommendation based on trends from the last 30 days.'

9 Use the Transaction Insights anomaly alerts to catch cost spikes as they happen. When your dairy supplier charges you $800 instead of the usual $400, Starch flags it automatically — you know before it hits your P&L three weeks later in QuickBooks.

10 Once you've made a pricing change, come back to Scenario Analysis 30 days later and tell Starch: 'Compare actual Stripe revenue this month to the scenario I modeled in March where I raised protein dishes $2.50. Did revenue per cover move the way I projected?' This closes the feedback loop most restaurant owners never close.

11 If you want to present your pricing analysis to a business partner, investor, or accountant, describe a summary deck to Starch and it assembles the slides from your data — revenue trends, margin by category, scenario comparison — without you touching Google Slides.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

April 2026 Pricing Review — 65-seat neighborhood Italian restaurant, Chicago

Sample numbers from a real run

Protein purchases (April, Plaid)	14,200
Dairy and cheese purchases (April, Plaid)	4,100
Bar COGS — spirits and wine (April, Plaid)	6,800
Total Stripe food revenue (April)	58,400
Total Stripe bar revenue (April)	19,200
Projected revenue lift — $2.50 entree increase (Scenario Analysis)	3,100
Projected revenue lift — 1hr happy hour reduction (Scenario Analysis)	1,400

In April, Transaction Insights flagged that protein purchases had climbed to $14,200 — up 22% from February's $11,600 — while Stripe showed food revenue essentially flat at $58,400. That's a food cost percentage creeping toward 24% on protein-heavy dishes when the target is 28–30% overall and protein items were already the tightest margin category. The owner ran a Scenario Analysis using Plaid and Stripe as the baseline and modeled two changes: raising the four pasta-with-meat dishes by $2.50 each and shortening happy hour from three hours to two. The model showed the entree increase alone projected a $3,100 monthly revenue lift assuming no meaningful cover loss — adding roughly 40 days of additional runway on current burn. The happy hour cut projected $1,400 in recovered bar margin. Neither required a full menu reprint; the owner updated prices in Toast and set a 60-day checkpoint in Growth Analyst to compare actual Stripe weekly revenue against the projection. The Monday digest three weeks later showed average revenue per cover had moved from $38.40 to $41.10 — directionally matching the scenario — with no measurable drop in weekly cover count.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Food cost percentage by category (produce, protein, dairy, alcohol) — actual vs. theoretical

Revenue per cover by day-part (lunch, dinner, late night, happy hour)

Bar margin as a percentage of total bar revenue

Month-over-month vendor payment change for top 10 suppliers

Projected runway impact of each pricing scenario before implementation

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

MarginEdge

MarginEdge is purpose-built for restaurant food cost tracking and does it well, but it doesn't connect to your bank feed, model pricing scenarios, or send you a plain-English weekly digest — you still have to go open it and interpret the numbers yourself.

Restaurant365

Restaurant365 gives you deeper accounting and inventory integration than Starch, but it's expensive, requires significant setup and training, and still doesn't give you a natural-language interface or a way to ask 'what happens to my runway if I raise brunch prices $3.'

Spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel)

A spreadsheet costs nothing and gives you full control, but it's only as current as the last time you updated it, requires you to do the scenario math yourself, and breaks the moment your bookkeeper is three weeks behind on categorizing transactions.

Toast Analytics or Square Insights

Your POS reporting shows you sales volume and item mix, but it doesn't know what you paid for ingredients, what's in your bank account, or how a price change would affect your six-month runway — it's sales data without the cost side of the equation.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, scenario planning, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My POS is Toast and it doesn't have an official API connection listed. Can Starch still pull my sales data?

Yes. If Toast has a web portal you can log into, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You tell Starch what data to pull (daily sales by category, item mix, cover counts) and it navigates the portal the same way you would. That said, the cleanest setup is pairing your Toast data with Plaid bank syncs, since your daily deposits reflect actual net revenue after chargebacks and refunds.

Does Starch store my bank transaction history, or does it query it fresh every time?

Starch syncs your Plaid transaction data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database. That means your Transaction Insights dashboard and Scenario Analysis model are always working from a current, structured copy of your transactions — not making a live call to your bank every time you open the app. The tradeoff: Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse. It's built for live operating decisions, not multi-year archived analytics.

I use a local accountant and QuickBooks. Does Starch replace that?

No, and it's not trying to. Your accountant and QuickBooks handle compliance, tax, and the official books. Starch gives you the operating picture before the books close — vendor spend trends, margin by category, scenario modeling — so you're not flying blind for three weeks waiting for your bookkeeper to categorize last month. The two work together. Note: QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily unavailable in Starch, but entity-level data like invoices, bills, and vendor payments syncs normally.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting bank accounts and payment data.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your business (more common for enterprise operators than independent restaurants), that's worth knowing upfront. Starch does not have an on-premises or self-hosted option either.

Can Starch tell me which specific menu items are underpriced, or does it only work at the category level?

It depends on what data you can get into Starch. If your POS exports item-level sales data (or Starch can pull it via browser automation from your Toast or Square portal) and you have ingredient cost data from MarginEdge or a spreadsheet, you can tell Starch: 'Build me a table showing each menu item, its price, its estimated food cost from this spreadsheet, and its margin percentage.' Starch builds that view from the sources you connect. The more structured your cost data, the more specific the item-level analysis.

I want to model what happens if I add a weekend surcharge. How does that work in Scenario Analysis?

Start by connecting Plaid and Stripe so Scenario Analysis has your real baseline revenue and burn. Then tell it: 'Add a scenario where I add a $4 Friday and Saturday surcharge. Assume 80% of weekend covers accept it without attrition and 20% don't return. Show me the projected monthly revenue change and how it affects my 12-month runway.' Starch builds the model from that description — you adjust the assumptions, not a formula in a cell.