Restaurant Intelligence
Brisket Went From $3 to $8 a Pound: A 7-Step Margin Playbook for When Your Top Protein Keeps Climbing
By Robert W. Kuypers · Updated
Ask a barbecue owner what changed in the last few years and you’ll hear one number. The founder of Single Tree BBQ told Toast that brisket was about $3 a pound when he started. It’s now $7 to $8. Beef overall is up roughly 17% year over year, and the USDA expects another 5.5% increase in 2026 as the cattle herd keeps shrinking.
Beef is the loudest example, but it isn’t the only one. Toast’s data puts food-away-from-home prices up about 4% year over year, natural gas up 10.8% and electricity up 6.7%. When your top protein, your utilities and your labor all climb at once, a single menu price increase won’t cover it. You need a playbook.
1. Know your prime cost every week, not every quarter
Prime cost, food plus labor, is the number that decides whether you make money. A common target is 60% to 65% of sales, with food and labor each near 30%. If you only check it when the accountant closes the books, you’re finding out about a problem two months after it started. Pull it weekly. When your top protein jumps, you’ll see the hit in days, not quarters.
2. Re-cost your top ten items
Most menus earn the bulk of their profit from a handful of dishes. Re-cost your ten best sellers at today’s invoice prices, not last year’s. You’ll usually find one or two items that quietly went from great margin to break-even. Those are the ones to fix first, through portion, plating, a supplier change or price.
3. Shop suppliers, and track prices like a buyer
According to Toast’s survey, 37% of operators have changed food suppliers and 36% are tracking ingredient prices more closely. Neither costs you anything but time. Get a second quote on your top five spend categories, ask about contract pricing on proteins, and check whether a group purchasing program can get you better terms than you’d negotiate alone.
4. Use the whole animal
Single Tree BBQ started making its own pickles, sausage, hot dogs, burgers and tallow, much of it from brisket trimmings that used to be waste. That’s the old butcher’s math: every scrap you turn into a menu item lowers the real cost of the cut you bought.
5. Raise prices surgically
Toast found that 48% of operators plan to raise menu prices if inflation continues. Do it carefully. A small increase on a high-volume, low-margin item does more for your P&L than a big increase on a dish nobody orders. And keep one or two items that feel like a clear value. Single Tree actually made its lunch burger bigger, going from 5 oz to 8 oz at the same $6.99, because a hero value item brings people in the door.
6. Don’t cut marketing first
When spending slows, the instinct is to cut everything that isn’t food or labor. Toast’s survey points the other way: 47% of operators said their first move would be to increase marketing, ahead of cutting hours or headcount. Traffic is the lever that makes every fixed cost cheaper per guest. Cutting it to save a few hundred dollars can cost you far more in empty seats.
7. Look at the fixed costs nobody re-shops
Card processing, insurance, waste hauling, linen, utilities and software subscriptions tend to auto-renew for years. Each one is small, so nobody looks. Together they can be thousands of dollars a year in savings that don’t touch the guest experience at all.
The bottom line
You can’t control what beef costs. You can control how fast you see the damage, which items absorb it and how much waste you pay for. The operators getting through this aren’t the ones with the lowest costs. They’re the ones who know their numbers every week.
If you want a second set of eyes on your costs, reach out to Restaurant Finance Advisors, or try the savings calculator first. We’ll go through your P&L and show you where the savings are.
Sources: Toast, “Navigating rising costs,” with data through January 2026; USDA price projections as cited by Toast.
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