Back-of-house, handled

Know your food cost before the month ends.

Count on a phone. Snap the invoice. Log the waste. chowhound turns the paperwork your kitchen already does into numbers you can act on this week — not six weeks later when the bookkeeper is done.

Get early access See how it works

Built for independent operators — one restaurant, not fifty.

The chowhound — a basset hound in a red bandana holding a clipboard of ticked-off counts
mascot mark
awaiting
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Food cost weekly, not monthly Pour cost without counting 150 bottles Waste in dollars, as it happens Invoices read for you

Three things, done properly.

Most back-office software asks a kitchen to behave like an accounting department. This does the opposite — it takes the three jobs that already happen and makes them quick enough that they actually get done.

01

Count on a phone

Sections in walking order, so you move down the shelf instead of hunting the sheet. Autosaves as you go, works when the walk-in has no signal, and two people can split a count without standing on each other.

02

Photograph the invoice

Line items, prices and pack sizes read off the page. Anything the parser isn't sure about lands in a short review queue rather than silently guessing — and a price that jumped since last week gets flagged before you pay it.

03

Log waste in three taps

What it was, how much, why. The dollar value appears immediately, because "four pounds of salmon" means nothing at 11pm and "$62" means everything.

The numbers that come back.

Every count, invoice and waste entry feeds the same ledger, so the figures below stay current instead of being reconstructed at month end.

Food
Theoretical vs actual, by period
Pour
By bottle, by bar, by shift
Prime
Food plus labour, the number that decides the month
Variance
What went missing, separated from what you threw away
Tuesday, 6:14am
  • Produce order short two cases Credit request drafted — approve to send
  • Chicken thigh up 14% since last week Outside its ninety-day band
  • Walk-in count finished by Marco 11 minutes, 94 lines
  • Waste logged: $62 salmon, prep error Third time this month — worth a look

Why another one of these?

Because the ones that exist are priced and built for groups. A single independent restaurant ends up paying enterprise money for a system it needs a consultant to set up, then quietly stops counting by March.

chowhound is deliberately narrower: the three jobs above, done fast enough that a cook will actually do them on a Tuesday. No modules you'll never open, no implementation project, no annual commitment to find out whether it sticks.

Honest about where we are

chowhound is being built now, with a real restaurant's books and a real walk-in, not a demo dataset. Early access means you shape it and you see the rough edges — not that you get a finished product on a free trial.

If that's the wrong trade for you right now, that's a fair call.