Restoke Helps Lifegrain Maintain Cost Control After a Major Menu Overhaul

Overview

Lifegrain is a growing Sydney café and catering business with six outlets, a headquarters, and a central production kitchen. After a full menu overhaul and supplier change, maintaining recipe consistency and cost control became a challenge. Restoke provided the solution—giving the team real-time visibility into food costs and helping them maintain accuracy as prices change.

Challenge

Launching Restoke alongside a complete menu and supply chain overhaul exposed just how hard it was for Lifegrain to keep costs accurate. Their recipes lived in Google Sheets that quickly became outdated, and their POS system couldn’t connect ingredient prices to menu items. The team lacked visibility on how supplier changes affected margins and needed a reliable way to keep COGS under control.

Solution

Restoke became the backbone of Lifegrain’s back-of-house operations. With recipes now linked directly to supplier pricing, the team can see theoretical COGS changes in real time and make fast decisions when ingredient prices shift. After some custom integration work with Shift8 POS, Lifegrain now enjoys full visibility of sales and cost data—all in one place. Restoke’s team worked closely with Lifegrain to tailor the setup and ensure accurate data transfer between systems.

We had some challenges with the custom integration, but Restoke worked closely with us to get it right. Now everything flows properly, and we’re getting the information we need.

Cliff R.
General Manager at LifeGrain

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Results

When I started, none of our recipes were written down. Even when we documented them, we hit the data limits in Google Sheets—and the moment we finished, they were already out of date.

Since implementing Restoke, Lifegrain has been able to sustain the 7% reduction in cost of goods achieved during their menu overhaul—something they previously struggled to maintain. Now, whenever supplier prices change, the team gets instant alerts showing how it impacts their theoretical COGS. That visibility allows them to make informed decisions on the spot: whether to adjust pricing, change builds, or review suppliers.

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