Automate Menu Food Cost Tracking in n8n + Google Sheets + Gmail

Stop food cost creep—automatically update recipe costs and alert you the moment targets are exceeded

This n8n workflow keeps your menu pricing honest by ingesting supplier price updates, recomputing every recipe’s food cost from the latest ingredient prices, and emailing you immediately when any menu item passes its target food cost.

What this workflow does

• Receives supplier price updates via the When Price Update Received n8n webhook (POST path menu-cost-intake-0926), normalizing fields like ingredient, unit_price, unit, supplier, submitted_by, and owner_email. It stamps an update_id and a received timestamp.
• Validates incoming data: if ingredient or unit_price is missing, the update is rejected and a rejection email is sent listing the required fields and the received payload.
• Logs prices to Google Sheets: valid updates are appended to the Prices tab in your Google Sheets tracker.
• Recomputes recipe and menu item costs using the latest ingredient prices.
• Flags overshoots daily at 06:00: a sweep at 06:00 checks menu item food cost against its target, logs results to CostAlerts, and emails an alert listing each flagged recipe with its portion cost and percentage.
• Sends a weekly digest every Monday at 07:00: gpt-6-luna reads the week’s cost stats and writes a plain-text digest highlighting the worst items and the menu prices needed to bring them back in line.

Use cases

• Your supplier raises chicken prices—immediately update ingredient pricing and detect which menu items now exceed target food cost.
• Automate food cost monitoring for multiple ownership emails using the workflow’s owner_email normalization and alerting.
• Get fewer surprises at month-end by turning cost creep into same-day email alerts and weekly summaries.

Technical details

• Integrations / nodes: n8n webhook, if, set, code, gmail, sticky note
• Data store: Google Sheets (writes to Prices and CostAlerts tabs)
• Notifications: Gmail emails for rejection cases, daily alerts, and weekly digests

Last updated: October 2026.