How to Track Ingredient Costs for Your Lebanese Restaurant or Café

Most restaurants and cafés in Lebanon price their dishes by feel — a rough idea of what the market charges, adjusted slightly for their costs. The problem is that in Lebanon, ingredient costs shift constantly. When the price of milk, flour, or olive oil jumps by 30% in a month, businesses that aren't tracking their input costs are the last to know their margins have collapsed.

The cost visibility problem

Without a system, you're relying on memory and intuition. A flat white might cost you $0.80 to make — but if coffee bean prices rise and you haven't noticed, it could be costing $1.10 while you're still charging $2.50 and feeling fine about the margin. Multiply that across a full menu and a busy shift, and you're losing money on every cup without realising it.

Ingredient tracking in YellowPOS fixes this by letting you store the cost per unit of every raw material and attach them to product recipes — so you always know what each dish actually costs to make.

Setting up ingredients

In your YellowPOS dashboard, go to Ingredients and add each raw material your kitchen uses. For each one, set the name, the unit of measurement (kg, g, L, ml, pieces), your current stock quantity, and the cost per unit in USD. This is the cost you pay your supplier per unit — not what you charge customers.

For example: "Whole Milk", unit: L, quantity: 20, cost: $1.20/L. Once you have your ingredients set up, the system gives you a live view of what's in stock and what's running low.

Building product recipes

On any product's edit page, you can add a recipe — a list of the ingredients it uses and how much of each. A Flat White might use 0.018 kg espresso beans and 0.150 L whole milk. Once the recipe is saved, the system calculates the total ingredient cost for that product automatically. When supplier prices change, update the cost of the affected ingredient and every product that uses it reflects the new cost instantly.

Managing stock and restocking

Each ingredient in your list shows a stock status badge — green for healthy stock, yellow for low, red for out of stock. When a delivery arrives, hit the + (import) button to add the received quantity. Use the Advanced Search to filter to all out-of-stock or low-stock items, which doubles as your reorder list. Export to PDF or Excel and bring it to your supplier.

Why this matters in Lebanon specifically

Lebanon's food supply chain is volatile. Prices change with the USD/LBP rate, with import restrictions, and with seasonal availability. Businesses that track their ingredient costs can react fast — adjusting menu prices when costs rise, substituting ingredients when supply is short, and spotting which dishes have thin margins before they become a problem. Businesses that don't track are always reacting to problems they never saw coming.

Getting started

Start by adding your top 10 most-used ingredients. Don't try to log everything at once — even partial coverage gives you useful cost signals. Then attach recipes to your 5 bestselling products. Within a week you'll have a clear picture of your real food cost, and you'll have the data to make better pricing decisions. Head to the Ingredients guide for a step-by-step walkthrough.