You can't negotiate what you can't see. Tell a supplier "your prices went up" and they'll nod, apologize, and change nothing — it's an opinion, and opinions lose negotiations. Tell them the olive oil climbed 14% across the last three deliveries, invoice numbers in hand, and the conversation changes shape entirely. That's the whole difference between operators who renegotiate every year and operators who never do.
Consign every invoice, or negotiate blind
Price history gets built one invoice at a time, and most kitchens throw that history away the moment the delivery is checked in and filed. The habit that fixes it: log every invoice line — item, unit, price ex-VAT, date, supplier — the day it arrives. Six months in, you're not guessing whether a price moved. You're reading it off a chart.
Compare per-unit, ex-VAT, always
A supplier who quietly drops a case from twelve bottles to ten hasn't held your price steady — the per-unit cost went up while the invoice total looked the same. VAT rates and rounding hide the same trick. Compare ex-VAT price per unit, every time, or you're negotiating from a number that was never real.
Pick your ten biggest lines
Nobody has time to renegotiate two hundred SKUs, and most of them don't move the needle anyway. Rank suppliers and items by annual spend and work the top ten. On a typical F&B P&L, food cost typically runs 28–35% of sales (industry range) — and that handful of lines usually carries most of it. A single renegotiated point on your biggest line is worth more than a perfect negotiation on your smallest.
Renegotiate on a schedule, not just when it hurts
Annual review of the top ten, plus an immediate conversation the moment consigned data shows a spike — that's the whole cadence. Waiting for the P&L to hurt means the margin already left the building weeks ago. A live price list that flags the move the same week it happens is what makes the annual review worth having at all.
None of this needs software to start — a spreadsheet and the discipline to fill it in after every delivery gets you most of the way. The full method — receiving checks, price history, and negotiating with proof instead of memory — is in the supplier management guide.
