Price with confidence
Your chefs cost every dish from real supplier invoices. You see every recipe, every margin, and set menu prices knowing the true food cost — not gut feel.
FOR CHEFS WHO'VE MASTERED THE COOKING
Chefs meet the business side late, informally, and defensively — a food-cost report slapped on the pass when margins have already slipped. Whetstone flips that: cost your dishes as you create them, build your prep lists, design your menus — with short lessons that explain the why while it happens in front of you.
Metrics reflect your direction, not your worth.
Revenue, costs, people, systems, risk, outcomes — you're already accountable for all six. We give you the framing to work with them.
Food cost 28% of A$22.95 sell price
Why this matters
At 72% GP, this dish carries the section. Drop the pickled shallot to 20g and you free 20p per plate without touching perception.
The career door
Your Whetstone account belongs to you — not the venue. Every dish you cost, every lesson you finish, every playbook you complete travels with you to every kitchen you ever work in. Learn the margins on tonight's menu, and walk into your next interview as the chef who runs the numbers, not the cook who's told them.
And if you own the venue
Your chefs cost every dish and learn the business as they do it — so the numbers you price on are real, and the crew running your pass is quietly getting better at the commercial side every service.
Your chefs cost every dish from real supplier invoices. You see every recipe, every margin, and set menu prices knowing the true food cost — not gut feel.
Assign playbooks and lessons. Your kitchen learns the business side while doing their daily work — no offsite training, no eye-rolling.
Design a polished, print-ready menu bound to live costs. Menu IQ tells you where to place your most profitable dishes and warns you when you're featuring a margin-killer. When a supplier price moves, your menu knows.
Not an inventory platform. No stocktake theatre, no surveillance. A system your kitchen actually wants to use.
The pathway
Each step teaches the commercial reasoning behind it. By the end, you don't just have a costed dish — you understand why it works.
Enter pack price once. We compute cost per gram, ml, or each.
Why: Learn true cost — pack size, yield, waste.
Combine ingredients, add sub-recipes, set your portion count.
Why: See how yields and portions decide GP.
Add garnish, sauce, protein. Watch the food cost update live.
Why: Understand where the margin lives on the plate.
Set a target GP. See the price. Negotiate from a position of knowledge.
Why: Charge what the plate is actually worth.
The mentor built in
Every screen has a Why this matters panel — a two-minute lesson from working chefs and operators that explains the number you're looking at, and what to do about it.
30% food cost isn't a rule — it's a trade-off. Learn when to push for 25%, and when 35% is the smarter play.
Unit price is a distraction. Yield, waste, and pack conversion decide what a kilo of beef actually costs you.
If you've moved GP from 62% to 68% on the mains section, that's a conversation. Here's how to frame it.
Words from the pass
“Repetition is the mother of skill.”
— A Logan Campbell kitchen mantra
Whetstone surfaces curated quotes from working chefs and cooks in the quiet spaces of the app. Pin the ones that stick to your personal chalkboard.
Rhythm, not panic
The best-run kitchens aren't reactive — they're rhythmic. Whetstone takes the same numbers you already live with and stages them across three horizons, so issues show up sooner, decisions carry less heat, and conversations with ownership start from evidence instead of defence.
Covers, staffing, prep load. Two quiet questions each day: does this feel normal, and if not, what's different? No grading, just noticing.
Food cost drifted two points? Don't reach for the knife first. Check volume, mix, supplier moves and waste. Most weekly problems close with alignment, not cuts.
Zoom out. Look at repeating patterns, not one hot week. Leadership at this level is as much about distance as it is about detail.
Rhythm won't take the pressure away — it just gives it somewhere to go.
The tool
Add pack sizes and prices once. Cost per gram, ml and each — automatically.
Combine ingredients with any unit. Yields, portions and conversions handled for you.
Set a target GP. See the price that gets you there. Understand every number.
AI in the kitchen
We ship AI where it earns its keep — reading invoices, generating prep, and answering costing questions in the language of a working chef. Free accounts get a monthly taste of each; the rest is credits or Pro.
Photograph a supplier invoice. We extract every line, match it to your ingredients, and update pack prices — so your recipe costs stay honest.
Turn tomorrow's covers into a section-by-section prep list — quantities scaled from your recipes. Preview it free; spend a credit to print or export when the menu changes. Pro Head Chef prints unlimited.
When a dish blows its GP target, ask the mentor. It suggests realistic swaps and portion tweaks in the language of a working chef.
Scale any recipe up or down to a target yield. The mentor flags what shouldn't scale linearly — salt, leavening, spice, cooking time — before you batch it.
One click walks every dish on a menu against today's ingredient prices, updates plate cost and FC%, and writes a chef-toned summary of what moved.
Pick an ingredient, get 3–5 professional substitutes with ratio, flavor and texture impact, allergen change, and whether it's cheaper or pricier.
Ingredient-derived allergen matrix for the whole menu across 14 standards. Click any cell to override. Print-ready for the pass or front-of-house.
Monday morning summary of last week's invoices, price moves, and dishes drifting off target — with three concrete actions to run this week.
Five print-ready templates bound to your live dish data. Change a price once — every menu updates. Allergen marks generate themselves. Profit psychology built into the layout.
Pricing
Costing, recipes, dishes and menus are always free. Credits pay for the AI-powered actions — priced so a chef spending 75–80 credits a month is better off on Pro.
Cost dishes, build recipes, learn. Forever free.
A$0forever
The career tier. Less than one staff meal a month.
A$15/ month
The kitchen tier. One mispriced dish costs you more per night.
A$49/ month
Prices in AUD, inclusive of GST. Cancel anytime — you keep paid access until the end of your period.
Cook sharper. Earn more.
Free while you learn. No card. No fluff. Just the numbers, explained.