Six weeks that teach you to see your kitchen the way an owner sees it, and to find the money that is already leaking out of it.
You can hold a section through a full book. You can run consistency when two people call in sick. You know your craft, and it took years.
What you were almost never taught is how to read the business the cooking lives inside. Not because you were not capable of it, but because the industry teaches cookery first and money never. So the P&L arrives at month end and tells you what already happened, in a language nobody explained, and there is nothing left to do about it.
That gap is expensive, and it is not your fault. It is also completely closeable.
On a venue turning over $100,000 a week, letting prime cost drift from a healthy 65 percent to 68 percent is three points. Run it across a year and it is roughly $156,000. Nobody decided to lose it.
Module 1 is six weeks of structured work that takes you from reading a P&L for the first time to running a full operator simulation on a real venue. It is not a business course with kitchen examples bolted on. Every lesson, worksheet and exercise is built inside a working kitchen, using numbers a chef actually sees.
You work through it at your own pace, one week at a time. Each week releases seven days after the last, so the material lands at the speed you can actually apply it rather than all at once.
Where the money actually moves, what you control, and how margin leaks quietly. You leave with a dollar figure on your own drift.
Revenue quality versus volume, margin versus markup, and why a busy summer can hide a weak winter. Operating leverage, in plain language.
Stock as money already spent. You learn to calculate what an ingredient should have used, and put a number on the gap.
The true hourly cost of your team, fixed versus variable labour, and revenue per labour hour as a weekly control you can actually roster to.
Weekly contribution per dish, and the four-quadrant classification that shows which dishes are carrying the kitchen and which are quietly costing it.
Reading the P&L line by line, seeing how one point of prime cost moves the whole result, and a five-step framework for turning any number into a plan.
Every module in the Academy runs inside the Kitchen Lab: a dinner-led coastal café, around 90 seats, $2.4 million a year, running a deliberately stressed prime cost. It is not a tidy textbook example. It is a venue under the same pressure yours is.
You diagnose the Lab first, where being wrong costs nothing. Then you run the same analysis on your own kitchen, where it counts.
This will not suit everyone, and it is better for both of us if you work that out now rather than three weeks in.
The exercises only work if you bring the real figures, including the ones that are worse than you expected. Those are the findings. That is where the money is.
Around twenty years in kitchens, and a bachelor's degree in business administration and finance. Trained at a leading university in Brazil and worked in corporate roles before choosing the kitchen instead.
Five businesses owned. That combination is the reason this material exists: the finance training to know what the numbers mean, and enough years on the pass to know what they feel like at 7pm on a Saturday.
The Academy is five modules. Module 1 gives you the financial foundation everything else stands on. From there the path continues into menu engineering, operational systems, leadership, and finally your own career.
You do not have to decide any of that now. Module 1 stands on its own, and it is worth doing whether or not you continue.
Yes, and it is arguably more useful earlier. A CDP who can read prime cost is doing something almost nobody at that level can do, and it is the clearest reason to be considered for the next role. You do not need authority over the numbers to learn to read them.
Every exercise can be completed inside the Kitchen Lab, which comes with full figures. Where you can bring your own numbers you will get more out of it, but nothing in the module is blocked if you cannot. Many chefs find that once they know what to ask for, and why, access becomes easier.
Around two to three hours: reading the lesson, then working the exercises. It is designed to be done across a week rather than in one sitting, because most of the value comes from applying it between shifts.
No. Nothing in the module goes beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and percentages. What matters is knowing which number to look at and what to do about it, and that is what the module teaches.
Yes. The Lab is a specific venue so the numbers are concrete, but every principle is structural: prime cost, yield, labour productivity, dish contribution. Chefs apply this in pubs, restaurants, hotels, catering and QSR. The figures change. The framework does not.
The lessons and workbooks are self-paced, released weekly. At the end of the module there is a wrap-up session, and it is genuinely optional. Plenty of chefs prefer to work through it on their own, and the module is built to be complete without the call.
Nothing automatic. You keep lifetime access to everything in the module. If you want to continue into the rest of the Academy you can, and there is a path for that, but there is no obligation and no ongoing charge.
Permanently, including any future updates to the module. The weekly release schedule paces how it unlocks, but once it is open it stays open.
The drift is happening in your kitchen right now, whether or not anyone is measuring it. Portions, prep, rosters, the dishes that look profitable and are not. None of it announces itself. All of it shows up in the result at the end of the year.
Six weeks from now you can be the person in that kitchen who can read it, name it in dollars, and do something about it while there is still time.