What Happens When Salmon Jumps 12%? Stress-Testing Menu Margin the Same Week

Hour zero: the invoice lands

The spike does not announce itself. It arrives as a unit price on today's delivery — $9.40 becomes $10.53. In a paper workflow this number dies on a clipboard, and the menu keeps selling salmon at last month's math through the busiest weekend of the summer.

See the blast radius, not the headline

The useful question is not "salmon is up 12%" — it is which plates, how hard:

• Salmon Crudo: margin 72% → 68%. Survivable; ride it out.
• Grilled Salmon entrée: 65% → 58%. Below floor; needs a decision.
• Salmon BLT (lunch): 61% → 52%. The quiet casualty nobody would have checked.

Same headline number, three different answers. Blast-radius visibility is what invoice-fed recipe costing buys you — the pipeline described in invoice processing, end to end.

Run the scenario before you commit

With current costs, "what if" is cheap: reprice the entrée by $2, trim the portion half an ounce, substitute steelhead at last week's invoice price — and see the new margin before anything hits the printer. One decision per affected dish, made with numbers, the same week. That is the whole discipline of pricing with current costs.

And if it's a false alarm?

Sometimes the spike is one short case, one supplier, one week. That is also worth knowing — because the operator who repriced the whole menu over a blip pays a different kind of cost. Latest-price tracking with history gives you the context to tell spike from noise.