Menu engineering — the recipe card behind your menu
Star. Puzzle. Workhorse. Dog.Every dish on your menu, classified in one service.
Rongo costs every plate from the recipe card — sub-recipes, trim loss, cooking yield —, crosses your POS sales and classifies the menu on the Kasavana & Smith matrix. 30% food / 25% beverage targets, computed live.
- Targets: 30% food · 25% beverage
- Built in Tahiti for restaurants and hotels
- Direct support from Tahiti, on your timezone
- devlab — founded 2014 · 14 experts · 100+ companies
Kasavana & Smith matrix — dinner menu
monthly sales importedThresholds recomputed on your actual sales — popularity × margin, the Kasavana & Smith method.
Numbers you can verify, not slogans.
Rules live in the tool, recomputed on your sales — not brochure promises.
0%
food cost target
Set in the tool and checked every day against your actual POS sales.
0%
beverage target
With a price suggestion per recipe card, to hold the margin on every pour.
0
quadrants per dish
Star, Puzzle, Workhorse, Dog — the Kasavana & Smith method, recomputed on your sales.
0
DGAE alert levels
Compliant, watch, exceeded — the gap in XPF on regulated alcohol prices.
Verified — the imports
Rongo reads the actual exports from your POS and purchasing: Agilysys InfoGenesis (HGD PBD/CBD), NAV, requisitions and comps. Every file is hash-deduplicated, archived and replayable.
The field
Built for the Polynesian field — from the independent restaurant to multi-outlet hotel operations, room service included, where island freight makes every food cost decisive.
A Dog kept out of habit costs you every month.
You know the service's revenue, rarely the plate's margin. Food cost sleeps in a spreadsheet recomputed at close: one supplier price moves, the margin drifts, and nobody sees it before month end.
- The spreadsheet is recomputed once a month — the drift is daily.
- Popular doesn't mean profitable: without crossing popularity and margin, you keep Dogs.
- POS exports re-keyed by hand: hours spent on a reading already stale.
A menu is steered at the plate, not at the top line.
The food cost calculator
Food cost
34 %
Gross margin / portion
1,180XPF
Gap to the 30% target
25,600XPF / month
Above the 30% target — likely Workhorse profile: rework the portion, the trim loss or the price.
Indicative reading against the 30% food target — the real classification also crosses sales popularity. Everything is computed in your browser; nothing is sent.
Coconut-milk raw fish
486 ÷ 1,800 = 27% — under the 30% food target
Selling price 1,800 XPF incl. tax
Net base
1,488 XPF
Service
148 XPF
VAT
164 XPF
Recomputed on every purchase-price change · draft → review → approval workflow
The plate's cost builds up line by line.
Nested sub-recipes, trim loss, cooking yield: Rongo keeps the cost per portion current as soon as a purchase price moves — and breaks the selling price into net, service and VAT, the way your controller does.
- A sub-recipe (stock, sauce, pressed base) is costed once and reused everywhere.
- Loss and cooking yield applied per ingredient — the displayed cost is the cooked, plated cost.
- A purchase price changes in NAV: every affected card recomputes.
Hotel-style net / service / VAT breakdown — annotated on every card.
Real food cost, held daily — not at close.
The matrix says what to change on the menu; cost control says whether the kitchen holds its costs. Rongo reconciles requisitions, comps and each outlet's revenue, every day, against targets.
requisition−comps÷revenue=real food cost
The F&B controller's formula, computed per outlet and per family (food / beverage), daily.
Daily cost control
Drift shows the same day
Ratio per outlet against target, with a status: green under target, orange up to 5 points above, red beyond. The daily trend replaces the month-end surprise.
POS linking
Every dish sold linked to its card
Rongo links your POS items to recipe cards by similarity score. Whatever stays orphaned raises an alert — nothing leaves the matrix silently.
Kitchen validation
No card moves without review
Draft, review, approval: the workflow traces who changed what, with dedicated kitchen roles. Six roles, automatic audit log.
Cost control — day 12
Beach restaurant
Food
28.4%
target 30.5%
Pool bar
Beverage
31.8%
target 29%
Room service
Food
36.2%
target 30.5%
Statuses: under target · up to +5 pts · beyond. Targets adjustable per outlet.
The DGAE price cap, watched bottle by bottle.
In French Polynesia, alcohol selling prices are capped by a coefficient on the purchase price. Rongo computes each reference's ceiling price, compares it with your menu price and logs every gap — compliant, warning, violation, with the gap in francs.
Rongo watches and alerts; filings remain yours.
Alcohol cap — bar menu
Red wine — bottle
Compliantmenu price 6,900 XPF · cap 7,120 XPF
− 220 XPF
Signature cocktail
Warningmenu price 1,850 XPF · cap 1,890 XPF
− 40 XPF
Premium spirit — 4 cl
Violationmenu price 2,400 XPF · cap 2,210 XPF
+ 190 XPF
Every status change is logged — the gap shows in XPF, not in a vague percentage.
Everything Rongo holds, without the varnish.
No icon-card grid: the actual list of shipped functions, as they run in production today.
| Function | What it does | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe cards | Recipes and nested sub-recipes, trim loss, cooking yield, cost per portion recomputed continuously, net / service / VAT breakdown. | Kitchen & F&B |
| Imports | Agilysys InfoGenesis exports (HGD PBD/CBD), NAV, requisitions and comps — hash-deduplicated, archived, replayable. | POS & purchasing |
| K&S matrix | Star / Puzzle / Workhorse / Dog classification by popularity × margin, per outlet, with cross-outlet comparison. | Menu engineering |
| Cost control | (requisition − comps) ÷ revenue per day, per outlet and per family, against targets — green / orange / red status. | Cost control |
| POS linking | Dish-sold ↔ recipe-card matching by similarity score, alerts on orphaned items. | POS ↔ kitchen |
| DGAE cap | Alcohol ceiling price by coefficient on the purchase price, gaps in XPF, alert log. | PF compliance |
| Validation & roles | Draft → review → approval workflow, six roles including kitchen roles, automatic audit log. | Organisation |
| Price history | Purchase prices tracked over time — supplier drift reads on the curve, dish by dish. | Purchasing |
| Multi-outlet | Each outlet has its menu, targets and margins; strict data isolation per property. | Groups & hotels |
This inventory is exhaustive: this page only sells what runs in production today. The rest lives on the roadmap — not here.
Pricing, plain and simple.
Monthly subscription per property, based on the number of outlets and the volume of recipe cards. The full grid is sent in writing within 24 hours. The order of magnitude checks out above: a single Dog removed from the menu pays for months of subscription.
Restaurant
One venue, one menu, one brigade.
- Recipe cards, POS imports, K&S matrix
- Daily cost control against targets
- Direct support from Tahiti
Hotel · multi-outlet
Several outlets under one F&B direction.
- Everything in Restaurant, per outlet
- Cross-outlet matrix comparison
- DGAE cap and alert log
Group
Several properties, dedicated needs.
- Multi-property, partitioned data
- Assisted recipe-card takeover
- Terms on quote
No public price until the grid is settled — rather than posting a meaningless “from”.
The questions we actually get
It's the hospitality-school menu engineering method: every dish is crossed on two axes — its popularity (share of sales) and its margin per portion — then classified Star (popular and profitable), Puzzle (profitable but low-selling), Workhorse (popular but low-margin) or Dog (neither). Rongo computes this classification automatically from your POS sales and recipe cards, per outlet, with thresholds recomputed on your actual figures.
From the recipe card: every ingredient is costed against your real purchase prices, with trim loss and cooking yield, nested sub-recipes included. Cost per portion and the food cost ratio recompute whenever a purchase price changes, against the 30% food and 25% beverage targets — with a suggested selling price.
Rongo imports actual exports from Agilysys InfoGenesis (HGD PBD/CBD files), NAV purchase prices, plus requisitions and comps in Excel. Every file is hash-deduplicated, archived and replayable. No real-time POS connection is required: you load the export, Rongo does the matching.
No. Rongo is built precisely to take over what exists: your recipe cards are entered once (or taken over with our assistance on the Hotel and Group plans), and your monthly flows — POS exports, requisitions, comps — are the same files you already handle, imported instead of re-keyed.
On the F&B controller's formula: (requisition − comps) ÷ revenue, per day, per outlet and per food / beverage family. The ratio is compared with the outlet's target: green under target, orange up to five points above, red beyond. Drift shows the same day, not at close.
The alcohol price cap: Rongo computes each reference's ceiling price (coefficient applied to the purchase price), compares it with your menu price and logs every gap with a compliant, warning or violation status, and the gap in XPF. It does not file declarations for you: it guarantees you never sell above the cap unknowingly.
Nobody without a trace. Cards follow a draft → review → approval workflow, with six distinct roles — including dedicated kitchen roles — and an automatic audit log. You know who changed what, when, and what went to review.
Each property is partitioned at the database level itself (strict multi-tenant isolation, enforced by the database itself and covered by a dedicated integration test suite). Your cards and margins never cross another client's. Support runs from Tahiti, on your timezone.
The monthly subscription depends on the number of outlets and the volume of recipe cards. There is no public price until the grid is settled: request it via the form at the bottom of the page — it's sent in writing within 24 hours.
Yes — and nothing more. The section 06 inventory is exhaustive: this page only sells what runs in production today, no “coming soon” features. If a specific need is missing, say so in the demo — that's exactly what feeds the roadmap.
Show us your menu. We'll classify it with you, live.
The demo
- 25 minutes, on your own dishes
- The K&S matrix on a slice of your sales
- No strings — and no slides
Slots on the Tahiti timezone — video call.
Get the pricing grid
Three fields, a written answer within 24 hours.