Ask a restaurant owner how much a margherita really costs them and the honest answer is often a guess. Suppliers change prices every week, recipes evolve and invoices pile up in a drawer. Food cost gets worked out in a spreadsheet at the end of the month, if at all. We built NettoChef to close that gap.
The problem we started from
Knowing the cost of a dish is simple arithmetic. Keeping it up to date is the hard part, because every price change on every ingredient ripples through dozens of recipes. Nobody in a busy kitchen has time to retype invoices.
AI does the typing
In NettoChef you take a photo of an invoice or a delivery note. The AI reads the items, quantities, prices and the supplier. With one tap prices, stock and price lists are updated, and every recipe that uses those ingredients is recalculated.
- Recipes and semi-finished products, such as doughs and sauces, reusable inside other recipes, with yield and waste calculated automatically.
- Cost per portion, food cost percentage and margin always up to date.
- The right selling price: you set your food cost target and the app suggests the price, VAT included. If a price rise pushes a dish over target, you know straight away.
- Menu engineering that crosses sales and margins, with suggested actions dish by dish.
- Stock and suppliers: inventory, theoretical versus purchased food cost and price lists from several suppliers side by side.
Built for real kitchens
Wi-Fi in a kitchen is never guaranteed, so NettoChef works offline. With the free account your data is backed up in the cloud on European servers and stays in sync between phone and tablet. You sign in with a code sent by email, without a password to remember.
AI is only useful when it removes a job people were never going to do by hand.
What we learned
The AI part is the visible one, but most of the work went into what happens after reading an invoice: matching items to ingredients, handling units and packaging, and updating everything in cascade without surprises. The same approach guides our client projects and our AI training for companies: start from a real, repetitive task and measure the time it gives back.
NettoChef is available on the App Store and Google Play. See all our apps on the projects page.