Built by operators, not a software company.
Optimal exists because a spreadsheet worked. For years the analysis behind it ran as a set of spreadsheets maintained by hand: export the sales mix, cost the plates, plot the matrix, write the five moves. It paid for itself every quarter. This product is that spreadsheet, automated — nothing more, and deliberately nothing more.
Optimal is built by Optimal Universe.
reports@optimaluniverse.com
Every message is read and answered by a person, within two working days. There is no phone line — restaurant hours and phone hours have never agreed, and a written answer with the numbers in it serves you better anyway.
Requesting your free report is the fastest way to start: the form takes one file.
Nine years of P&L, six years of line
Mara Ellison
Mara ran a three-location restaurant group in the Pacific Northwest and owned the P&L for nine years — the hiring, the leases, the 3 a.m. walk-in failures, and the quarterly menu meeting where the same argument repeated: which dishes actually earn. She ran her group at a 34.2% labor cost against a 36.5% full-service median, mostly by being unwilling to guess.
She writes the recommendations. When your report says "reprice the burger," the reasoning and the arithmetic come from the same discipline she ran her own houses with.
Dan Okafor
Dan spent six years as a kitchen manager — ordering, costing, prep lists, the dish pit at close — before moving to the office side, where he built the menu-engineering spreadsheets the group ran on. Every operator who saw the matrix asked for a copy. The copy kept breaking, because spreadsheets do.
He built Optimal so the analysis survives contact with a busy week: upload the export, get the moves, get back to service.
Your sales figures are yours
You are uploading your own sales data, and we treat that as the trust issue it is. The short version: your export is used only to produce your report, never sold, never aggregated into benchmarks without your explicit opt-in, deletable on request, and retained for 90 days, then removed. The full version is on the data handling page.
For anything else — a question about the analysis, a POS we have not listed, a report that raised a question — write to reports@optimaluniverse.com.