FoodByUs, Australia’s largest online hospitality wholesale ordering platform, has launched a new feature, Price Tracking, designed to help the more than 90,000 independently owned Australian restaurants, cafes and caterers access real-time pricing visibility across all items and suppliers. The result? Unprecedented accuracy leading to lower food costs, better expense management, and higher profitability.
With over 4,000 suppliers and thousands of venues on its platform, FoodByUs helps create transparency, efficiency, and ultimately improved operations across all layers of the hospitality industry. Venues that use FoodByUs typically reduce their cost of goods sold (COGS) by 15 per cent through time savings, improved reporting, and better prices. Very soon, FoodByUs will release Menu Costing, which includes functions such as menu breakdown into ingredients, prep recipes and dish recipes, margin monitoring, and waste calculations, all with live price tracking. This is expected to save hospitality businesses additional costs across the board.
“Venue operators are looking for innovative ways to improve their business operations and bottom line. Unlike for consumers, open and transparent pricing for food businesses is not common – so it becomes imperative to easily track price changes,” says FoodByUs CEO and Co-Founder Ben Lipschitz.
The Price Tracking feature was specifically created to ensure venue operators and chefs have a level of transparency never seen before, giving them the power to optimise their purchasing decisions and maximise operating profits. The unique technology, which took six months to build, uses AI to interpret any invoice, absorbs each line item including the quantity, unit of measure, and price, then feeds this into the FoodByUs Invoice Hub.
Key features of Price Tracking include:
Live prices, anywhere, anytime: Access accurate, up-to-date pricing from any supplier, ensuring chefs have the latest information to make cost-effective purchasing decisions.
Price history and trends: View the price history of any product over the past 12 months, enabling chefs to identify trends and anticipate future costs.
Expense management: Monitor and manage food costs precisely through Spend Tracking. This includes detailed reports on total spend and spend by product, highlighting areas for potential savings.
Price and spend alerts: Chefs and venue operators can set a wide range of price or spend alerts for a variety of products. This helps them stay on top of shifting market prices and helps keep their cost of goods in check.
“Using FoodByUs’ Price Tracking to monitor our food costs has been extremely valuable for us. The ability to see fluctuations in food items has helped us save up to 50 per cent on certain ingredients by buying smartly, especially with fruits and vegetables,” says Zest Waterfront Venues Executive Chef Christopher Dobbie.
“It helps us identify out-of-season items, which influences our menu planning and allows us to confidently set menus for functions months in advance, ensuring we keep costs down while maintaining our high-quality meals.”
On top of Price Tracking, FoodByUs offers other innovative features such as flexible payment options, automated invoice capturing, and direct integration with accounting software like Xero, MYOB, and QuickBooks.
Sign up now to get 90 days of FoodByUs Premium for free (usually valued at $149/month). You’ll get access to their all-inclusive features and everything you need to save time, money, and hassle on wholesale food ordering. FoodByUs is available to download on Android Play and the App Store.
