Production-grade Python and pandas patterns that turn fragmented recipes, POS exports, and inventory snapshots into auditable margin intelligence.
🌐 Live site · Architecture · Ingestion · Cost Variance · Reporting & CI/CD
restaurant-menu.org is a focused, deeply technical reference library on the engineering of automated food-cost systems for multi-unit restaurant operations. Every page is a hands-on guide with reproducible Python implementations, vectorized pandas idioms for cost roll-up, and the operational guard-rails needed to deploy these pipelines across hundreds of locations.
It is written for the people who actually build and run these systems:
- Food-tech developers who need schemas and vectorized calculation primitives they can deploy without hand-rolling reconciliation logic.
- Multi-unit operators who need location-accurate margins that survive regional supplier swaps and out-of-band price corrections.
- Culinary managers who need to see exactly how a recipe change ripples into margin.
The whole library is built on four engineering principles: deterministic by default (pure functions on DataFrames), schema-first ingestion (malformed records are quarantined, never silently coerced), vectorized at scale (no row-by-row loops), and decimal-grade precision (financial arithmetic uses Python's decimal module to eliminate floating-point drift).
The site is organized into four in-depth sections, each with focused topic guides and step-by-step how-tos:
| Section | Focus |
|---|---|
| Core Architecture & Cost Mapping Systems | DAG-based recipe bills of materials, POS taxonomy mapping, yield factors, unit canonicalization, and the multi-location cost-centre architecture that holds it all together. |
| Data Ingestion & Recipe Parsing Workflows | PDF extraction, CSV bulk imports, POS API polling, async batch processing, inventory reconciliation, and menu schema normalization — the ingestion contracts that keep theoretical models honest. |
| Theoretical vs Actual Food Cost Calculation | Variance mapping, cost-variance attribution models, supplier price tracking, dynamic alert thresholds, portion standardization, and the waste-tracking systems that close the gap between recipe and reality. |
| Reporting, CI/CD & Delivery Pipelines | Batch margin reporting, food-cost diff checks wired into CI/CD gates, and scheduled report distribution — turning validated cost data into decisions operators actually receive. |
Every guide leads with problem framing, progresses through validated, runnable Python and SQL, and closes with operational reliability guidance — the way engineers actually read a technical reference. Diagrams are hand-authored, theme-aware inline SVG; every page carries structured data (JSON-LD), an FAQ, and a dense internal link graph.
This repository contains the full source of the static site:
- Eleventy (11ty) static site generator, with Nunjucks layouts and Markdown content.
- markdown-it with anchor, attribute, and task-list plugins, plus Prism syntax highlighting.
- Hand-authored, responsive, theme-aware inline SVG diagrams — no image binaries for diagrams, no diagram runtime.
- A content-hash asset cache-busting filter for immutable, long-cached assets.
- Deployed to Cloudflare Pages.
npm install # install dependencies
npm run build # build the static site into _site/
npm run serve # local dev server with live reload
npm run deploy # build + deploy to Cloudflare PagesContent lives under content/ as nested Markdown; the URL structure mirrors the directory tree. Layouts, includes, data, and assets live under src/.
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