Craftable’s Cantu on Boosting Restaurant Profits

Restaurant profit isn't just a prime cost problem. It's a financial acumen problem.

Craftable CEO David Cantu joined Bloomberg Intelligence's Choppin' It Up podcast to talk prime cost, manager-level financial acumen, food waste, and why the back office is the next big thing in restaurant tech.

Listen to the full episode here.

For decades, restaurant teams have been trained to watch a short list of numbers: food cost, labor cost, prime cost. Those numbers matter. But they describe only a fraction of where margin actually goes.

That was the starting point when Craftable CEO David Cantu sat down with Michael Halen, Senior Restaurant and Foodservice Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, on the Choppin' It Up podcast. Drawing on his years as an operator and his work building hospitality technology at HotSchedules and Black Box Intelligence, David made a direct case: the industry has narrowed its attention to a few headline metrics while profit leaks out through everything those metrics don't capture.

In his words: "We have taught restaurant employees to focus on prime costs, but there are so many other ways to lose money."

Why prime cost only tells part of the story

Prime cost is a useful summary. It rolls food and labor into a single figure operators can track against sales. The problem is what it hides.

A healthy prime cost can still sit on top of waste, over-portioning, vendor price creep, receiving errors, and invoices that were never checked against what actually showed up at the door. None of those issues announce themselves in a weekly prime cost number. They live one level down, in the day-to-day decisions that move money before any report gets run.

David's point on the podcast was that operators rarely lose margin in one big, obvious place. They lose it in dozens of small ones, repeated across every shift and every location. The work of protecting profit is the work of seeing those small leaks early, while there's still time to act on them.

The case for financial acumen at the manager level

One of the through-lines of the conversation was where this responsibility actually sits.

Financial performance is often treated as a back-office concern, reviewed by finance after the period closes. By then the decisions that shaped the numbers have already been made, on the floor, by managers. The manager deciding how much to order, how to portion a dish, whether to question a delivery, or which vendor invoice to approve is the person actually steering margin.

David argued that the operators who pull ahead are the ones who build financial acumen at that level. Not by turning every manager into an accountant, but by putting clear, understandable cost information in front of them at the moment it's useful. When a manager can see how today's purchasing and usage map to cost, the daily decisions get sharper. Profit stops being something finance reports on later and becomes something the team manages as it happens.

This is where the right systems earn their place. Craftable gives managers live visibility into food costs, vendor spend, and variance by location, so the people making operational calls have the numbers in hand instead of waiting on a month-end summary.

Food waste is a margin problem hiding in plain sight

David also spoke to food waste, a cost most operators feel but few measure precisely.

The gap to watch is the one between theoretical usage, what recipes say a restaurant should have used, and actual usage, what inventory says it really used. That variance is where waste, over-portioning, spoilage, theft, and recipe inconsistency show up. Treated as a vague line item, waste is easy to shrug off. Measured against theoretical usage, it becomes specific enough to fix.

Craftable connects physical counts to recipes and live vendor pricing, then tracks theoretical cost of goods against actuals so operators can see variance as it develops and trace it back to a cause. The goal is the same one David kept returning to: catch the leak early, before small losses compound into a margin problem nobody can explain at the end of the month.

Why the back office is the next big thing in restaurant tech

Much of the last technology cycle in restaurants happened at the front of the house: point of sale, online ordering, loyalty, guest-facing apps. David's view is that the next wave is the part guests never see.

The back office, purchasing, receiving, inventory, invoices, payments, and the financial reporting that ties them together, has been the most fragmented and least connected corner of restaurant operations. It's also where margin is won or lost. Operators have spent years stitching together separate tools and spreadsheets for each piece, which left the most financially important data scattered and slow to reach the people who needed it.

Craftable was built to consolidate that work into one platform: procurement through financials, with the data connected end to end. More than 10,000 operators run on it, with over $5 billion in purchasing and millions of invoices flowing through the platform each year. The thesis behind the podcast conversation is that as labor stays tight and margins stay thin, the operators who treat the back office as a competitive advantage, not an afterthought, are the ones who hold their profit.

Because profitability isn't created in a report. It's created through the decisions operators and managers make across every location, every shift, and every transaction.

Listen to the full conversation

Want the complete discussion on prime cost, financial acumen, food waste, and the future of the restaurant back office?

Listen to David Cantu on Bloomberg Intelligence's Choppin' It Up podcast here: Craftable's Cantu on Boosting Restaurant Profits