Pricing Mirror
Every menu item, your price against your anonymized peer range for that protein-and-format cell, plus the marketplace-adjusted equivalent on Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash. Keep, review, cut, merge, or reprice. One call per item.
An Ignite XDS product
The intelligence layer for your restaurant.
Margin Lab reads across your POS, your accounting, and every distributor you use. Reconciles what you sold to what you paid. Compares your menu to anonymized peers. Scores you against the AI engines your guests use. It runs on top of the tools you already own.
- Independent restaurants
- Multi-unit family concepts
- BBQ and slow-food operators
- Neighborhood pizza
- Casual seafood
- Diners
- Growing chains
- Performance Foodservice accounts
The Invisible Table
Numbers your competitors are not looking at, and neither are you.
Four numbers from reconciled operator data. Four from the published research behind The Invisible Table. Every one sourced, none estimated.
27.25%
Blended food cost reconciled to real invoices, not distributor averages.
Reconciled operator data
16.81%
Grubhub markup measured on matched menu pairs. Uber Eats and DoorDash exactly 20%.
Reconciled operator data, matched pairs
$1.02 / guest
Defensible baseline lift on an $18.24 chain average, before pricing harmonization.
Reconciled operator data
8 of 12
AI answer engines that cite an operator by name for their top local queries, until the questions get specific.
Reconciled operator data
83%
Of restaurants are invisible in AI-generated recommendations.
BrightLocal LLM audit, The Invisible Table
6% → 45%
Consumer use of AI for local discovery, in a single year.
BrightLocal, 2026, The Invisible Table
79%
Of restaurant searches are non-branded discovery, not someone looking for you by name.
Malou, 2,000+ locations, The Invisible Table
875%
Year-over-year growth in searches for food near me open now.
Search Engine Land, The Invisible Table
How it works
Not another dashboard. A read of your business, delivered.
Margin Lab starts with a Diagnostic. We reconcile your POS to your food invoices, normalize every marketplace price against your own menu, and score your visibility across the AI engines guests use to find you. You get a card-based read, a two-page brief, and a login your PFG rep sees too. From there, one repricing wave and a monthly Margin Watch keeps your menu from drifting.
- Reconciles POS with your PFG invoices to a defensible food-cost number
- Normalizes marketplace prices so you can see your real position
- Shows your menu against anonymized peer ranges, never named competitors
- Scores your AI visibility on the twelve queries that matter for your category
- Publishes the structured data guests need to find you
What Margin Lab does
Six views of one restaurant.
One login, six screens, no BI course required. Every screen answers a question you should be able to answer about your own business but probably cannot today.
Margin Ledger
POS reconciled to your food invoices. Blended food-cost trend, per-item contribution margin once recipes are loaded, and a hard pass-or-flag on the reconciliation test that most operators cannot run themselves.
Discount and Comp Watch
Comps and promos by store and daypart, flagged as an audit signal, not a margin claim. Because the POS mixes service recovery, employee meals, and manager discretion, we treat variance as something to investigate, not something to book.
Answer-Engine Scoreboard
Twelve local queries per month, scored on whether the AI engines cite you by name and whether they rank you first. The ones you lose become a specific content backlog for your website, not a vague SEO plan.
Catering Transparency Score
Your owned catering page against the pattern your best-in-class peers use. Package prices, headcounts, minimums, cutoff windows, and feeds-N descriptions. Every gap is a bookable action.
Opportunity Model
Five engines: pricing, off-peak, seasonality, catering, and AI visibility. Presented as ranged, capacity-capped, and compounding. Assumptions exposed. Not a forecast. A bounded model of what is realistic.
The six screens
The screens
Every image below is drawn from a real Margin Lab dashboard. Numbers are anonymized composites. Peer identities are never disclosed. The screens are square-cornered by design.
Margin Ledger. Blended food cost reconciled to invoices, twelve-month trend against peer median.
Answer-Engine Scoreboard. Twelve local queries, four AI engines, refreshed monthly.
Catering Transparency Score. Owned page against the best-in-class pattern, every gap a bookable action.
Opportunity Model. Five engines, ranged, capacity-capped, assumptions exposed.
Portfolio view. What your PFG rep sees, if you accept the Growth Grant.
How it fits with your other tools
Not a replacement. A layer that reads what your tools already know.
Margin Lab does not replace your POS, your accounting system, your inventory tracker, your back-office platform, or your distributor's ordering app. It reads them. Toast, Aloha, Square, Clover, SpotOn, QuickBooks, whichever back-office platform you run, your distributor's ordering portal, and the food invoices from every distributor you use. One reconciled read, once a month, in language your operator understands.
For Performance Foodservice accounts
Ask your PFG rep about the Growth Grant.
Margin Lab is an Ignite XDS product, and it is available to any operator who wants it. For select Performance Foodservice accounts, PFG may underwrite the Diagnostic through the Growth Grant, so the first read on your business comes with no consulting bill attached. Ask your rep whether your account qualifies, or start the conversation with us directly.
The commercial
One diagnostic. One optimization. One retainer. One chain program.
No bundles you cannot unbundle. No annual minimums under the retainer. Numbers below are the starting points for a single location; chain programs are quoted per location with volume steps.
$6,500
Diagnostic. One-time. A reconciled read of your food cost, menu position, catering transparency, and AI visibility. Ninety-day dashboard access included.
$16,500
Optimization. Bundled. Diagnostic plus a repricing wave, a catering rebuild, and structured-data publication. Six-month dashboard access.
$1,750 / mo
Margin Watch. Full dashboard access, monthly reconciliation, competitor and marketplace drift alerts, quarterly repricing waves. No annual minimum.
Chain
Multi-unit program. Per-location retainer with volume steps, portfolio dashboard, and a roll-up view for your PFG account team.
Ready when you are
Twenty minutes to see whether Margin Lab fits your restaurant.
We do not sell a platform. We deliver a read of your business, and then we help you act on it. Start with a short call. If Margin Lab is the wrong fit, we will tell you inside twenty minutes and point you somewhere better.