What operators ask before they sign.

A reconciled, evidence-based read of one restaurant across five dimensions: food-cost reconciliation, competitive menu pricing, catering transparency, AI-answer-engine visibility, and a bounded opportunity model.

Roughly two to three weeks from the day your POS export and food invoices are in our hands. Two calls, one delivery meeting.

Six evidence cards, a two-page executive brief, a twenty-two-page appendix, and ninety days of read-only dashboard access. Everything is yours to keep, whether or not you engage further.

A named Ignite XDS team, led by a strategist who has run reads on operators of your archetype before. You meet them on the first call.

About one in five reads produces that outcome. You still receive the full deliverables and we tell you plainly in the delivery meeting. We do not manufacture upside that the evidence does not support.

Toast, Aloha, Square, Clover, and SpotOn are supported first-class. Others can be worked with case by case. Tell us on the first call.

No. Margin Lab is POS-agnostic. We adapt to your export, not the other way around.

A standardized product-mix export from your POS, food invoices from your primary distributor for the same period, and access to your public marketing surfaces: your website, Google Business Profile, and marketplace listings. Nothing about labor, rent, or full P&L is in scope for the Diagnostic.

In your own workspace inside our platform. Peer comparisons render as anonymized ranges only. Nothing about your restaurant crosses to any other operator's account.

No. Not to distributors, not to marketplaces, not to any third party. Aggregated peer ranges are the only place your data ever contributes outside your own account, and the aggregation is anonymized at the cell level.

You keep every deliverable. Your dashboard goes read-only for thirty days so you can export what you need, then the account is archived. If you want a full data extract, we provide it in a portable format.

By protein-and-format cell. Your pulled pork by the pound sits in a cell with other operators of your type, in your region, at your service format. We use interquartile ranges, the middle fifty percent of the cell, as the honest peer band.

Every peer cell requires at least five restaurants before a comparison renders. The minimum is enforced at the data layer, not just the UI. Your restaurant appears in someone else's peer range only as one anonymized data point among many, and the same is true in the other direction.

Public restaurant websites, Google Business Profile menus, and normalized marketplace pulls where terms permit. We do not scrape private data. We do not use another operator's Margin Lab invoices in a peer range for anyone else.

Then that comparison does not run. We tell you which cells passed the minimum and which did not, and we do not fabricate a range from too few data points.

No. Margin Lab is an Ignite XDS product available to any operator. The Grant is one path in. Talking to us is another.

The full $6,500 Diagnostic, for qualifying accounts. Same deliverables, same methodology, same appendix.

No. Not a purchasing rebate, not a distributor lock-in, not a data trade. Optimization and Margin Watch, if you choose them, are paid by the operator at standard pricing.

The same dashboard read your Ignite team sees. Peer ranges are anonymized. Your food invoices, your P&L, and any figure not derived from your public menu or your POS reconciliation stay with Ignite XDS.

Back-office platforms are excellent operations tools. Daily-use software for your kitchen and your back office. Margin Lab is not that. Margin Lab runs on top of whichever one you use, reads its data, and answers a different set of questions: how your menu compares to anonymized peers, how your marketplace prices normalize, how AI answer engines cite you, and where your Opportunity Model bounds are. If you already run one, Margin Lab reads it and adds the layer it does not deliver.

A distributor's tool serves the distributor's economics. It reads that distributor's own pricing, and it steers you toward that distributor's own-brand substitutes. Both are legitimate. Neither compares you to your peers. Neither reads across distributors. Neither scores your AI visibility. Margin Lab does all three, works with any POS and any distributor, and is not built to sell you more product. That is why it is priced.

Because we don't sell you food. A distributor's tool carries no charge because it pays for itself in your next case order. Margin Lab has no such revenue stream. What you pay for is a distributor-agnostic, POS-agnostic, competitor-anonymized read that no bundled tool can deliver. If the read does not justify the cost within one operating quarter, you say so and we refund the last month of Watch. We have not been asked to yet.

Direct POS integrations for Toast, Aloha, Square, Clover, and SpotOn are shipping through 2027 as part of the Margin Lab platform. Today, Ignite XDS's team runs the reconciliation manually from your product-mix export. Same deliverables. The dashboard becomes continuously live once the integration lands for your POS. See the roadmap for what is shipping when.

The Diagnostic reads invoices from any distributor. PFG, Sysco, US Foods, Cheney Brothers, Ben E. Keith, local produce, alcohol distributors, whichever ones you use. As direct electronic invoice feeds come online with distributor partners, those invoices process instantly. The rest are OCR-processed. One reconciled food cost across all of them.

No. Cancel any month, no penalty. Your dashboard stays read-only for thirty days so you can pull anything you need.

No. About a third of Diagnostic clients decline Optimization. Some go straight to Margin Watch. Some do neither and use the cards to work on their own.

Yes. Diagnostic and Optimization can be split into two payments, first at kickoff and second at delivery. Margin Watch is monthly by default.

No, unless a site visit is agreed. Remote delivery is the default and no travel is billed. If a visit is agreed, travel is billed at cost with prior approval.

Probably not. Chains of that scale are served better by internal analytics teams. We can talk, but the honest recommendation is usually to hire.

The AI-visibility lever does not apply to your model. The pricing and margin work still can, but you are getting less than half of what a physical restaurant gets. We tell you that up front.

The reconciliation stage depends on POS data. Without it, we cannot produce the food-cost read that anchors everything else. We are not your firm.

Peer-cell pricing does not work well when your menu is a single narrative rather than à la carte items. We can talk about catering, off-premise, or private events, but the core pricing engine is not your leverage.

Possibly not. If your team already reconciles POS to invoices monthly, runs peer benchmarking, and audits your AI visibility, we do not add much. Some operators use us for the appendix and the outside perspective. Others do not. Both are legitimate.