Catering is event math at scale — a recipe that feeds four has to feed four hundred, a proposal has to clear after ingredients, and every order is a one-time buy you can't afford to over- or under-shoot. Lowboy is a sous-chef for the back of house: it scales any menu to the guest count, costs it per head from your real invoices, and turns it into a buy list netted against your walk-in.
Every event is different, and pricing each one by hand eats the hours. Let Lowboy do the cost math so you can focus on the food and the clients you love serving.
You already handle the paper — Lowboy just reads it. Snap the supplier invoice, the event menu, a recipe card, the signed proposal. Nothing about how you run events has to change; it simply adds a smart layer on top that turns your experience into numbers you can quote from.
Then it works like a sous-chef doing the prep math for you: computed from your data, never guessed. "That 250-guest buffet costs $11.40 a head at today's prices — quote it above $34 to hold margin." "You have 6 of the 14 lbs of chicken on hand; order 8." Real recipes, real invoices, real counts, turned into the two things a busy event kitchen lives and dies on: margin and hours.
Scaling, per-head cost, event ordering, proposal margins — the parts of catering that a plate-cost tool never touches.
Enter the covers — 40 or 400 — and every quantity recomputes from your recipes. Your prep and shopping lists scale exactly, no legal pad the night before.
no mathEach event costed from your real invoice prices into a total and a true cost-per-head — a real number, not a rule-of-thumb per-plate estimate.
real marginThe scaled order becomes a buy list netted against what's already in the walk-in — so you order for the event, not for a guess, and less is left over after.
order rightSee the food cost and margin of a menu at a given head count and price before you send the quote — so a booked event actually clears after ingredients.
quote with proofSnapped invoices update your price book. When a staple jumps, Lowboy flags the events and menus it touches so a quoted price isn't quietly underwater by event day.
catch creepEvery recipe costed, scalable and shareable to the crew — so a big event is prepped the same by whoever's on it, at the batch size the event needs.
consistencyLowboy's suggestions come from how your kitchen actually runs — your recipes, invoices and counts — so they protect both the margin on the event and the hours before it.
A typed-in catering cost calculator gives you a rule-of-thumb per-head number and hopes your prices haven't moved. Lowboy computes your real number from your actual recipes, invoices and counts — the exact dishes on this event's menu, scaled to this guest count, at the prices you actually paid last week. For catering that precision is everything: orders are large and one-time, a proposal has to hold its margin from signing to service, and a single mis-scaled staple across 300 covers is real money either wasted or short.
Enter the covers and every recipe recomputes into a scaled prep list and a shopping list netted against your walk-in, so you buy for the event and less is left over after. Each menu costs out to a total and a true cost-per-head, so you can price a proposal knowing it clears after ingredients rather than hoping it does. And because snapped invoices keep the price book current, a jump in a staple surfaces before event day — not in the post-event reckoning.
See it on your own events in about three minutes with the free food-cost audit, or explore the free tools first. No account required.
Catering often runs off proposals and invoices rather than a till, so Lowboy works entirely from what you snap. Have a storefront on Square? Connect it and sales auto-fill. It's POS-agnostic either way.
Add the hours back, too — no spreadsheet nights, no manual invoice entry, no rebuilding the prep list when the menu changes.
Less time on the back office, more time on the food, your crew, and the reason you opened.
Get your free audit →