Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity
Picture the scene. It’s 2:30 PM on a Sunday. The ticket machine is screaming, the front of house is sweating, and you’ve just turned a table of four for the second time. The till shows you’ve taken £4,000 since midday. You feel good. You feel like a “successful” publican.
But you’re lying to yourself.
If you don’t know your exact Sunday Roast food cost percentage—down to the penny—that £4,000 is just a vanity metric. I’ve seen pubs doing 300 covers on a Sunday and making less net profit than a quiet wet-led boozer down the road. Why? Because they are hemorrhaging margin on the meat.
In the UK, the “standard” target GP (Gross Profit) is 70%. But on a Sunday, most of you are accepting 60%, or even 55%, because you think it’s inevitable. You’re letting “shrinkage,” “over-portioning,” and “waste” eat your retirement fund because you’re too busy carving to do the maths.
Every extra slice of beef you give away because you “don’t want to look stingy” is money straight out of your back pocket.
The Philosophy: The “Sutherland” Approach to Portion Control
Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, teaches us that human value is subjective, not objective. In the kitchen, we obsess over objective metrics: “Is this exactly 180g of beef?”
But the customer doesn’t weigh the meat. They weigh the experience.
Operators lose money because they try to solve a psychological problem (customer satisfaction) with an expensive engineering solution (more meat).
If a customer complains a roast looks “small,” your instinct is to add another slice of expensive Topside. That’s an economic disaster. Sutherland would tell you to look at the “framing.”
- Is the plate too big, making the food look lost?
- Are the cheap elements (Yorkies, roasties, parsnips) providing enough structural height?
- Is the plate crowded with colour?
You don’t need to feed them until they burst to get a 5-star review. You need to provide perceived abundance. A massive, crispy, 10p Yorkshire pudding creates more “value” in the customer’s brain than an extra £1.50 slice of beef hidden under the gravy.
Stop selling meat by the kilo. Start selling the theatre of the roast.
The Tactics: How to Fix Your GP This Weekend
You want to hit a rock-solid 70% GP on roasts? Stop guessing. Here is the operational triad for this Sunday:
1. Calculate Yield, Not Invoice Weight Most of you cost your dish based on the raw weight of the joint. “I bought 5kg for £50, so that’s £10 per kg.” Wrong. Beef shrinks by roughly 20-30% depending on the cut and your oven temp. If you cook 5kg of Topside, you might only get 3.5kg of serve-able meat.
- The Fix: Weigh the joint after it comes out of the oven and has rested. That is your true cost price. If you don’t use this number for your costing, you are underpricing every single plate.
2. The “Protein Anchor” Your chefs are likely free-pouring the carvery. I once watched a chef carve 220g of beef for a standard plate because he was “in the flow.
- The Fix: Buy a cheap set of digital scales for the pass. Weigh the first five plates of the service. Calibrate the chef’s eye. If the spec is 160g, 160g goes on the plate. If you serve 200 covers and over-portion by 20g each time, you have given away 4kg of cooked beef. That is literally giving away £80-£100 of pure profit.
3. Cost the “Invisible” Items Are you costing the horseradish? The mustard? The extra gravy boat they ask for? The “free” cauliflower cheese upgrade you use to sweeten the deal?
- The Fix: Add a “buffer” percentage to your dish cost. I add 5% to the total food cost of every roast to account for condiments, napkins, and the inevitable dropped potato. If you don’t account for it, you pay for it.
The Solution: Stop Calculating on a Fag Packet
Look, I know what Sunday morning is like. You’re trying to get the cellar cooling fixed, the commis chef has called in sick, and the delivery van is late. You do not have time to sit with a calculator and work out the shrinkage coefficient of a silverside joint.
So you guess. And you lose money.
You could spend your Monday morning hungover, staring at invoices and trying to figure out why the bank balance looks low.
Or, you can use the Roast Forecaster.
I built this tool specifically for the UK pub trade. It’s not a bloated Epos system. It does one thing: it calculates the exact profitability of your Sunday Service.
- Enter your raw meat weight.
- It automatically applies the correct shrinkage ratio for that specific cut (Pork vs Beef vs Lamb).
- It tells you exactly how many portions you actually have, not how many you think you have.
- It tells you the exact price you need to charge to hit 70% GP.
The Conclusion
The era of the “loss leader” Sunday Roast is over. Energy bills are up. Staff wages are up. You cannot afford to run a Sunday service as a charity event for the local community.
Get your costing right. Weigh the meat. Control the yield. And for god’s sake, stop letting 10% of your profit disappear into the bin.