When Costs Move Faster Than Prices: Why Pricing Execution Is Now the Risk
Last week, we brought operators, menu experts, and industry leaders together for a brunch and panel discussion hosted by Tech on Toast in partnership with Openr.
The conversation focused on a challenge that has quietly become one of hospitality’s biggest commercial risks. Costs are moving fast. Pricing execution is not.
What became clear very quickly is that this is not a failure of intent or commercial thinking. Hospitality businesses are full of experienced leaders making thoughtful pricing decisions. The problem lies in execution.
That conclusion is reinforced by new research produced by Tech on Toast in collaboration with Openr, based on responses from operators across restaurants, pubs, cafés, hotels, and contract catering businesses across the UK.
Pricing decisions are happening, pricing execution is not.
The research highlights a widening gap between pricing decisions and deployment.
More than 60% of operators take one to two weeks or longer to deploy a price change across all sites and channels. Nearly three-quarters review pricing only one to three times a year, despite ongoing cost volatility. 65% still rely on spreadsheets to manage pricing execution.
The impact is rarely dramatic or visible in one moment. Instead, margin erosion happens quietly. By the time a price change goes live, the cost increase it was meant to offset has often already been absorbed.
During the panel, Joel Robinson, Founder of Openr, described how even a single price change now needs to be aligned across EPOS, delivery platforms, websites, kiosks, and printed menus. Without a connected source of truth, simple changes become slow and risky, forcing teams into fewer, larger, higher-pressure pricing updates each year.
The hidden workload behind every menu change
Execution is not just slow, it is resource-heavy.
Alice McCombie of Hall & Woodhouse shared how, in a 40 to 60-site estate, a single pricing update can involve multiple people across IT over several weeks, before finance, marketing, and operations are even factored in.
The research supports this reality. Nearly 40% of operators estimate their teams spend more than 20 hours every month collating menus, rekeying prices, and fixing inconsistencies. In larger estates, this regularly exceeds 100 hours a month.
This workload creates a confidence gap. When execution feels fragile, teams slow down. Pricing decisions become more conservative. Estate-wide changes replace smarter, more targeted adjustments.
Why spreadsheets are no longer enough
Another clear signal from the research is the demand for a single source of truth. Over 70% of operators want one place where menus and pricing are managed and controlled. Many are still relying on spreadsheets, email chains, and manual checks, duplicating data across systems and channels. Fewer than half are fully confident that prices are consistent everywhere at any given time.
Annica Wainwright, Co-founder of 2Forks, summed this up well on the panel. Blanket price increases rarely deliver the best outcome. Strategic pricing that protects key value items, nudges high volume dishes, and tests smaller changes performs far better, but only if teams can move quickly and confidently.
Why this research matters now
This research is not about telling operators how to price. It is about showing why pricing has become constrained and why execution is now the limiting factor.
Cost volatility is not a temporary challenge. It is the new operating environment.
As the report concludes, what breaks first is not intent or intelligence, but execution. Closing the gap between pricing decisions and deployment is one of the most immediate and controllable ways hospitality businesses can improve profitability, resilience, and confidence.
👉 You can download the full Tech on Toast × Openr research report to explore the data, operator insights, and what modern pricing execution needs to look like in practice.