How to Handle Supplier Price Increases (+ Email Template)

It usually arrives with no ceremony. A short note from your rep — “heads up, chicken’s going up next week” — or nothing at all, just a bigger number in the third column of an invoice you sign while the driver waits. Either way, the same two instincts show up: eat it and hope it’s temporary, or reach straight for the menu and raise prices to cover it.

Both are wrong, or at least premature. Knowing how to handle supplier price increases comes down to three moves in order — verify it, push back on it, then adjust only what’s left — and the menu is the very last thing you touch. Here’s the whole play, plus the email to send your rep before you pay a cent more.

Don’t accept it on reflex

A price increase is an opening position, not a final one. Before you update a single recipe cost, the move is the boring one: don’t unquestioningly accept it. Check it against your own history, understand what’s driving it, and know your number before you pick up the phone. Some increases are real and fair — a genuine commodity swing you’ll see reflected everywhere. Some are margin quietly being padded on an account that hasn’t pushed back in two years. You can’t tell which until you look.

Step 1: Verify it’s real — and put a dollar figure on it

Percentages lie to you. “Up 12%” sounds either scary or trivial depending on your mood; a number tells the truth. So convert every increase into dollars per week and dollars per year before you react.

Pull the same vendor’s invoice from a month or two back and compare the unit price line by line — the same exercise as reading an invoice for cost creep. Then do the math on the movers. Here’s what that looks like on two items going up the same week:

Item	Old price	New price	Change	You buy / wk	Extra / year
Chicken thigh (per lb)	$2.60	$2.95	+13%	120 lb	+$2,184
Smoked paprika (per lb)	$6.00	$7.50	+25%	2 lb	+$156

Look at what that reframes. The paprika jumped twice the percentage of the chicken — 25% versus 13% — and it’s almost noise: $156 a year. The chicken is the one that matters, because you buy a lot of it. This is the honest answer to “is a 20% increase too much?” It depends entirely on the item’s weight in your basket. A 20% bump on a garnish you buy two pounds of is a rounding error. The same 20% on your number-one protein is a part-time salary. Fight the increases that move real money; wave the small ones through and save your energy.

Step 2: Push back before you pay it

Once you know which increase actually hurts, that’s the one you work — and most of them have more give than the invoice implies. Your rep has room they don’t advertise, especially on a steady account. Ask the questions plainly: what’s driving it, what would hold the old price, is there a volume commitment, a different pack size, or a comparable substitute grade that gets you most of the way back. Ask about locking a price for the next couple of months so you can plan. The conversation is free, and it’s the fastest lever you’ve got.

Before that call, price-check the item against one alternate supplier so you know your real market number. You’re not doing this to threaten anyone — you’re doing it so you’re negotiating with a fact instead of a feeling. If the same quality is meaningfully cheaper elsewhere, you’ve got either a switch worth making or a genuine lever, and knowing when to switch versus renegotiate is the difference between a bluff and a plan.

The email to send your rep

Here’s a template that does the whole of Step 2 in five minutes. Copy it, fill the brackets, send it the day the increase lands. It’s polite, it’s specific, and it makes clear you’ve done your homework without picking a fight.

Subject: Price increase on [item] — week of [date]

Hi [Rep name],

I saw [item] moved from [$old] to [$new] per [unit] on this week's
invoice — about [X]%. Before I lock in new menu costs, a few questions:

1. What's driving the increase, and is it expected to hold or ease off?
2. Is there anything that keeps me near the old price — a volume
   commitment, a different pack size, or a comparable substitute grade?
3. Can we hold a set price on [item] for the next 8–12 weeks so I can
   plan the menu around it?

We run about [X lbs/cases] of this a week and I'd rather keep it with
you than shop it around. Let me know what you can do.

Thanks,
[Your name] — [Restaurant]

More often than not you’ll get something back: a partial hold, a substitute that closes half the gap, a price lock that at least buys you a planning window. That’s margin you’d have handed over by staying quiet.

Step 3: Only if it sticks, work the levers — reprice last

Say you’ve verified it and pushed back, and the number is simply the new reality. Now — and only now — you adjust, in the same order that protects the guest every time. Tighten the portion if it’s drifted, since a tight portion you’d been eyeballing can quietly absorb a small increase on its own. Work the supplier angle you just opened. Reformulate gently where the dish can carry it without the customer noticing. And reprice last — only the specific dishes that ingredient actually touches, sized to the real gap, not the whole menu in a panic. There are plenty of ways to absorb a cost increase before the price on the board is the one that moves.

That order is the whole point. A supplier increase is a supplier-level problem, and it usually has a supplier-level fix. Reaching straight for the menu price means making your regulars pay for a phone call you never made.

The honest catch

Running this play on one increase, on a slow afternoon, is genuinely doable — and worth it. What breaks is the frequency. You’ll catch and quantify the chicken this week; next month it’s cooking oil, and the month after it’s the cheese, and each one arrives buried in a different invoice you’ve got four seconds to sign. Nobody re-totals every vendor’s every line every week while also running the floor. The increase you catch in August is replaced by three you miss by November.

That’s the whole reason Mise exists. You snap a photo of each supplier receipt as it comes in, and we read every line, remember what each item cost last time, and flag the increases big enough to matter — while you can still send that email and do something about it. No invoice archaeology, no finding out on the accountant’s statement in the spring.

But you don’t need us to start. Next time a price moves, put it in dollars a year, send the email, and work the levers before you touch the board. If you’d rather never miss the ones that matter — see what your menu actually costs →

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