With Rapp’s investment and expertise, restaurateurs now have unprecedented access to food costing and menu engineering software to reduce expenditures and optimize profit—all at the click of a button.
PALM SPRINGS, CALIF., October 25, 2007—Menu engineer Gregg Rapp announces that he has made a significant investment in Cost Genie, a food-costing software company.
An accurate one-stop shop for menu costing, Cost Genie software allows restaurateurs to take and monitor inventory, standardize recipes to the right proportion for chefs and produce a report that showcases the greatest profit items broken down by category.
Now, Rapp’s investment and expertise as a menu engineer further enhances the Cost Genie software by giving tools to restaurant owners and managers to analyze high-margin items for their menus. “I find that restaurants and chains have a lot of data but no information,” Rapp says. “This software compiles the data into useable information.”
For Rapp, who has helped restaurants engineer their menus and maximize their profits for the past 25 years, his decision to invest in Cost Genie was an easy one. “I’ve worked with competitors’ software in the past, but when I found Cost Genie, I instantly recognized the power we could bring to the food-service industry,” Rapp says. “We are now a team that works with restaurants by helping them save time, reduce their food costs and maximize profits.”
Cost Genie is the creation of Kenny Arone and Mark Kerr. Arone has worked for Aramark and spent 15 years as a restaurant consultant in Mexico and the U.S. He has also served as a chef instructor. Kerr brings extensive experience in the computer programming and printing industries. Arone and Kerr have differentiated Cost Genie from its competitors by providing clients a complete recipe file that features built-in costs. “Kenny has been costing the cooking textbooks for Prentice Hall,” Rapp explains. “He brings thousands of recipes that are already costed so we can show restaurateurs new items for menus and the profits for each one. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about the tools we can develop in the future.”
In addition to providing these costing services, Cost Genie includes USDA nutritional information for every menu item. Having access to this data at their fingertips will give restaurateurs yet another competitive advantage, since many city and state governments will eventually require restaurants to make their nutritional information public.
“The whole Cost Genie program has jumped to a new level with Gregg’s contribution,” Arone says. “The software allows you to compete with the big chain coming to town, or, if you are the big chain, it allows you stay ahead of the other chains.”
The optimized Cost Genie program is ideal for startup and tried-and-true restaurants alike. “With Cost Genie, we can conduct forensic menu food cost audits for restaurants with serious food and liquor issues, as well as help brand-new institutions become super profitable.”
To complement his new investment in Cost Genie, Rapp will soon offer a Menu Costing Boot Camp in tandem with his popular Menu Boot Camp in Palm Springs, Calif.
For more on Cost Genie’s enhanced food-costing software services, log on to www.costgenie.com. For more information on Gregg Rapp’s menu engineering services, see www.menutechnologies.net.
