The nine numbers every tiffin kitchen should track

A tiffin kitchen can look healthy and be dying. Subscriptions are paid up front, so cash arrives before the cost of delivering against it. A kitchen losing customers steadily still has money in the bank for months — right up until the renewals stop covering the groceries.

Nine numbers separate what is happening from what it feels like.

1. Food cost percentage

Ingredients and packaging as a share of revenue. Target 30%. This is the vital sign — it moves before anything else does, and it moves for fixable reasons: a supplier raised prices, portions crept up, a dish on the rotation is more expensive than you thought.

Check it monthly. A drift from 30% to 38% is a $2,000-a-month problem at 100 meals a day, and it is invisible in a bank balance.

2. Contribution per meal

Price minus everything that varies with volume — food, packaging, the delivery cost of that stop. This tells you whether an additional customer makes you money, which is not automatic. A customer in a far zone can have negative contribution: every meal you send them makes you poorer.

The method for calculating this is in how to price a tiffin service.

3. Monthly recurring revenue, and ARPU

MRR is the normalised monthly value of every active subscription. ARPU is that divided by active customers. Together they answer a question a bank balance cannot: if nothing changes, what do I earn next month?

ARPU also catches a slow poison — customers migrating from monthly plans to weekly ones. Your customer count holds steady, your revenue quietly falls.

4. Churn, and the cohort behind it

The share of customers who do not renew. Headline churn is worth watching; cohort retention is worth acting on. Group customers by the month they joined and track how many are still with you at month two, three, six.

That view answers the question that matters: is the business getting better at keeping people, or just better at replacing them? A kitchen with 15% monthly churn needs to replace its entire customer base every seven months, and that treadmill is where owners burn out.

5. Revenue at risk this month

Subscriptions coming up for renewal, plus overdue balances, plus anyone who has signalled they are cancelling. This is the only number on this list that is actionable *today* — a renewal reminder sent three days early saves subscriptions that otherwise lapse through simple inattention.

6. Delivery success rate

Delivered stops as a share of attempted ones. Anything under about 97% is a real cost: a failed delivery is a meal you cooked, packed, drove and cannot charge for, plus a customer you now have to apologise to.

Failures cluster. It is usually one bad address, one buzzer that never works, or one driver who marks stops from the parking lot. Track why they failed, not just how many.

7. Revenue and cost per zone

Break revenue, delivery count and success rate down by delivery area. Almost every kitchen has one zone that is quietly unprofitable — too few customers, too far apart — and subsidising it out of a good zone is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by accident.

The fix is rarely to abandon it. It is to raise the price there, restrict it to one day a week, or set a minimum customer count before you drive.

8. Customer lifetime value, and concentration

Average revenue per customer over their whole relationship tells you what a new subscriber is worth, which tells you what you can afford to spend acquiring one.

Concentration is the companion number, and the more urgent one. If your top five customers are 40% of revenue, you do not have a subscription business — you have five relationships and a lot of exposure. One office contract ending should not be able to halve your month.

9. Meals per weekday

Average meals cooked by day of week over the last several weeks. Unglamorous, and it saves more money than anything else here — it is what lets you buy the right quantity of vegetables on a Sunday instead of over-ordering and composting the difference.

Most kitchens have a real Monday peak and a Friday trough and have never quantified either.

How often to look

You should not be computing these by hand

Every number here is derivable from data a tiffin kitchen already generates — who is subscribed, what was cooked, what was delivered, what was paid. The work is in the joining, and that is what software is for.

Tiffinware ships sixteen reports covering all nine: profit and loss with margin and food-cost percentage, subscriptions and MRR with plan mix and ARPU, customer growth with cohort retention, customer value and concentration, renewals and revenue at risk, delivery performance by area, failed deliveries with reasons, zone economics, driver leaderboards and pay reconciliation, collections and payment mix with GST collected, menu performance, and skips and pauses.

It is $99 a month flat — unlimited customers, no commission on your orders, and a 14-day free trial. You can open the live demo and click through every report with sample data, without signing up.

The kitchens that survive their third year are not the ones with the best food. They are the ones who noticed the food-cost drift in week two.