Here's the formula every successful restaurant uses: Recipe Cost ÷ Menu Price = Food Cost Percentage. Keep that number between 28% and 35% for most dishes. Higher than 35% means slim profits. Lower than 28% might price you out of the market.
Let's calculate a real example — couscous royale, a Friday staple across Morocco:
| Ingredient | Amount | Cost (MAD) |
|---|
| Lamb shoulder | 200g | 32 |
| Chicken | 150g | 15 |
| Merguez | 100g | 18 |
| Seven vegetables | 300g | 12 |
| Couscous grain | 200g | 6 |
| Spices & tfaya | - | 8 |
| Total Recipe Cost | | 91 |
At 30% food cost, your menu price should be 91 ÷ 0.30 = 303 MAD. But that's before labor and overhead. Add 25% for labor (76 MAD) and 20% for rent, utilities, and equipment (61 MAD). Your break-even price hits 228 MAD. Price it at 285 MAD for a healthy margin.
Most restaurants in Marrakech's medina charge 180-220 MAD for couscous royale. Now you see why they struggle — they're barely covering costs, let alone making profit.
Restaurant Pricing Software vs. Excel: The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions
Excel seems free, but it costs you three hours every week. When your supplier raises chicken prices from 24 to 28 MAD per kilo, you manually update every dish with chicken. Miss one cell, and your "profitable" chicken pastilla becomes a loss leader.
Here's what happened to Amina's seafood restaurant in Agadir last month. She discovered four menu items priced below cost — grilled sardines, seafood pastilla, fish tagine, and calamari rings. Using Excel, she spent two days recalculating recipes, checking supplier invoices, and adjusting prices. Her competitor using a restaurant menu management system got instant alerts when margins dropped below 25% and adjusted prices that afternoon.
The real cost isn't the software price. It's the money you lose while manually catching up to market changes. When olive oil jumps from 45 to 58 MAD per liter (as it did last March), every fried dish needs repricing. Software calculates instantly. Excel users scramble for days.
OCHI's Recipe Builder: Live Cost Tracking for Moroccan Restaurants
OCHI approaches pricing differently through its restaurant menu management software. Connect your recipes to real supplier prices, and the system tracks costs automatically. When your meat supplier updates prices, every tagine and kebab recalculates its margin. You see which dishes dropped below your target food cost percentage.
The recipe builder handles Moroccan cooking realities — dishes that use shared prep (like chermoula appearing in six recipes) or ingredients bought in different units (saffron by the gram, oil by the liter). Set your target margins, and the system suggests new prices when costs shift. Your online menu ordering system updates automatically across your QR codes, website, and POS.
Pricing isn't just math — it's psychology. A study of 200 restaurants in Rabat found that items priced at 49 MAD sold 23% more often than the same item at 50 MAD. One dirham difference, massive impact.
Apply these proven techniques to your menu:
Price anchoring works. List your most expensive dish first in each category. When customers see a 340 MAD royal seafood platter, the 180 MAD grilled fish seems reasonable. Without that anchor, 180 MAD feels expensive.
Avoid round numbers except for premium items. Price your everyday tagine at 79 MAD, not 80 MAD. But that special occasion lamb shoulder? Price it at exactly 300 MAD to signal luxury.
Position matters. Items in the top-right corner of menu pages sell 17% more. Put your most profitable dishes there — usually items with lower food costs but high perceived value, like vegetarian options or egg-based dishes.
Modern diners check prices on three channels — Google, your website, and QR codes at the table. Price inconsistency kills trust. One customer sees 85 MAD online, another sees 95 MAD on the printed menu. Both feel cheated.
Restaurant menu software solves this by maintaining single-source pricing. Update once in your restaurant menu management system, and it flows everywhere — your branded ordering site (yourrestaurant.ochi.ma), QR menus, and POS. During Ramadan, update your ftour special prices once. Every channel reflects the change instantly.
This matters more than you think. Last year, a Fès restaurant lost a 200-person corporate event because their online menu showed outdated prices 40% lower than reality. The client felt deliberately misled.
Restaurant pricing software isn't about complex algorithms or AI predictions. It's about knowing your real costs, maintaining healthy margins, and keeping prices consistent everywhere customers look. Start with the math — recipe cost, labor, overhead. Then use tools that track these numbers automatically as your costs change. Because in the restaurant business, the difference between 28% and 38% food cost is the difference between growth and closure.
See how OCHI helps Moroccan restaurants track costs and optimize pricing at ochi.ma/partners.
