The Supplier Price That Moved

Nobody approved it. There was no letter, no negotiation, no conversation.

The case that was £38 is £44, and it got there in four steps over fourteen months, none of which was large enough to notice on the day.

This is the most common way margin leaves a venue, and it is almost never the thing being watched.

Why the invoice does not catch it

The invoice is checked against the delivery, not against last time.

Someone confirms twelve cases arrived and twelve cases were billed. That check is real and it is worth doing — it just cannot see a price move, because the price on the invoice is always correct by definition.

⚠️ A rise of four percent is invisible on a single document and obvious across twelve. The comparison that finds it is one nobody's routine includes.

Where increases actually enter

Four places, in rough order of how much they cost.

The line price itself. The straightforward one, and the only one most people look for.

The pack. Same price, fewer units. Or a bottle that went from 70cl to 68cl. Nothing on the invoice changed, and your cost per serve went up.

Lost discount. A volume break or an agreed rate that quietly stopped applying — often because a threshold moved, or because the arrangement was with a rep who left.

Delivery and surcharges. A fuel levy, a small-order charge, a pallet fee. Individually trivial, and they compound because they are never in the price comparison.

The middle two are the ones that survive a price review, because a price review looks at prices.

The comparison worth doing

One afternoon, once, and then quarterly.

Take your top twenty lines by spend. For each, pull the unit cost — cost per serve, not cost per case — from twelve months ago and today.

Sort by percentage change.

In most venues, two or three lines account for most of the drift, and at least one of them is a surprise. That is the whole finding, and it does not require a system to produce; it requires the two numbers to be comparable, which is the part that usually fails.

⚠️ Cost per serve is the unit that matters. A price that rose four percent while the pack shrank six percent is a ten percent increase, and cost per case will not show it.

What to do once you can see it

Take the two or three lines to the supplier. Not all twenty. A specific conversation about a specific line, with dates, gets a different response from a general complaint about prices.

Check whether the discount is still applied. This one is frequently just an error, and it is frequently backdatable. It is the highest-return call on the list.

Reprice, or don't — but decide. A cost increase absorbed silently is a decision to earn less, made by nobody. It is a legitimate choice; it should just be a choice.

⚠️ Do not reflexively switch supplier on price alone. Reliability on a Friday delivery is worth real money, and the venues that chase the cheapest line often pay for it in a way that never appears on an invoice.

The trap

The instinct after finding drift is to build a monitoring system — a spreadsheet of every line, updated weekly.

It will be abandoned within two months. They always are, because the work is constant and the finding is occasional.

Quarterly, top twenty, cost per serve. That is enough to catch anything that matters while it is still small, and it is a task that actually gets done.

Three to hold

Cost per serve, top twenty lines, versus twelve months ago. The drift.

Gross margin by category, quarter over quarter. Catches what the line-level check misses — including pack changes you did not spot.

Delivery and surcharge total as a share of spend. The one nobody counts.

Where the record has to sit

If invoices are filed and never compared, and the till knows what you sold but not what it cost, the two numbers exist in different places and the drift is unmeasurable. That is why it runs for years.

tasteck keeps sales against the cost basis you set, so a margin that moved shows up as a margin that moved — while the cause is still one conversation away.

Nobody put the price up. It went up four times, and each one was too small to argue with.