For independent café owners

Where's the margin opportunity in your menu?

Two quick calculations. The first shows your current margin on one drink. The second shows three different ways to grow it, side by side — each one within your control.

Worth saying up front: this isn't a set of instructions, and it isn't trying to give you an answer. It won't tell you "raise your price by 5% and you'll make £X." It's about asking a more logical question first — how big is the prize, actually — so you can judge whether any of this is worth pursuing at all, and if so, which lever's worth going after first.

Step 1

Your current per-cup margin

Pick one drink — ideally your best-seller. We'll work out what it actually costs to make, including the time it takes, and your current gross margin on it.

Drink

Price charged

Bean cost, per kg

Dose used, grams

Milk cost, per litre

Milk used, ml

Cup, lid, sleeve

Time to make and hand over this drink, seconds

If one person takes the order and makes it, count the whole thing. If those are two different people, just count the time on the machine.

Labour cost, per hour

Rough guide: take the hourly wage, add about 3% for pension, then about 15% for employer National Insurance. Many small cafés pay little or no NI thanks to the Employment Allowance, so it might just be wage + 3-5%.

Anything else — syrup, alt milk upcharge, etc.

Your current gross margin

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Step 2

Three ways to grow it

Same drink, same numbers. None of this is about weighing every shot or scraping out the milk jug — each lever below comes down to whether the right tools, training, staffing, or processes are in place. The point isn't to hand you a to-do list. It's to size whether fixing the root cause is even worth the effort, before anyone spends time or money on it.

Drinks sold, roughly, per week

Price

The same conservative, expected, and aggressive scenarios we'd model in a real pricing review. Root cause: usually a pricing review that hasn't happened in a while — not the number on the board.

+5.0% price move

No change+15%

New price

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New margin

—

Annual gain
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Speed

Not about rushing anyone — this is what tighter workflow, better station layout, or proper training can realistically do to service time. Root cause: the setup people are working with, not how hard they're working.

-20% time saved

No change-35%

New time

—

New margin

—

Annual gain
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Waste

Not from your numbers — a widely used restaurant-industry benchmark for avoidable waste (over-pour, wasted shots, spoilage), typically 4-10% of ingredient cost. Shown here at 5%, as a stretch target, not a diagnosis. Root cause: consistent tools, portioning, and training — not close supervision or someone counting every bean. And if the number's small, that's a useful answer too: it means don't bother.

Recoverable/cup

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New margin

—

Annual gain
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Reaching this takes consistent portioning and tracking, not a one-off fix.

How each change adds up — annual gross profit on this drink

Scenario total — this drink

£0

a year in extra gross profit on this one drink, at the price, speed, and waste levels you've selected above. Not a total opportunity for your business — that needs a full menu, not one drink.

This is one drink.

Different items on your menu carry different amounts of headroom on each of these three levers — and for multi-site owners, the answer often looks different at every location. If any of these numbers came out small, that's a genuinely useful answer too: it means it's not worth chasing right now. If they didn't, the next question is what actually fixing the root cause — the right tools, training, or process — would take, and whether it's worth it.

Price and speed use your actual numbers; waste uses an industry benchmark, not a measurement
The combined figure assumes all three are achieved together — in practice this usually happens one step at a time
It's one item — a full menu review usually surfaces two or three with far more room than you'd expect

If any of this was useful, it's worth talking through what it could look like across your whole menu.

Talk through your numbers