Free cafe planning resources
Practical guides and food writing for Australian cafe founders. Everything you need to plan your menu, understand your numbers, and open with confidence.
Planning guides
HospoSure guide
How to make a cafe menu that works
Most cafe menus are built the wrong way round. Founders start with dishes they love and work forwards. By the time the doors open, the menu is trying to do three incompatible jobs at once.
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Cafe business plan template (Australia)
First-time cafe founders often Google for a template hoping to find a Word document they can fill in. The honest answer is that a template is the wrong unit of work. A cafe business plan is not a form; it is the output of 50+ decisions made in the right order. This guide covers what an Australian cafe business plan needs, where templates fall short, and how to build a plan that holds up to a lender, a landlord, and your own future self.
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The 7 menu decisions of cafes that thrive in year one
The Australian cafe scene is a tough market. The cafes that build something lasting tend to share a pattern: not better coffee, not a better location, but a set of menu decisions made before the doors even opened. Get those decisions right and the cafe has every chance to thrive past year one.
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How big should a cafe menu be?
First-time cafe founders almost always overshoot on menu size. The instinct is to give every customer something they like, which produces a 35 to 40 item menu where the kitchen cannot consistently deliver any of it well. The cafes that thrive past year one tend to land somewhere between 15 and 25 items, and they get there through a focused decision about who their customer is, not by trimming a long list.
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How much does it cost to open a cafe in Australia?
First-time founders often Google this question hoping for one clean number. The honest answer is a range, and the range is wide. An Australian cafe costs anywhere from $80,000 for a coffee cart to $500,000 or more for a fitted kitchen, depending on format, location, and how much of the work you can do yourself.
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How to cost a cafe menu in Australia
Costing a cafe menu properly is one of the highest-leverage skills a first-time founder can build. It takes the guesswork out of pricing, shows which dishes are actually making money, and catches the ones quietly losing it before they damage the business.
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How to negotiate a cafe lease in Australia
Signing a cafe lease commits you to 5 to 10 years of rent before you have made a single sandwich. The structure of that lease, the clauses inside it, and the negotiation you do or do not do before signing will shape your cash position for the entire term. Get it right and the lease is one of the cafe's foundations. Get it wrong and the next decade is spent trying to climb out from under it.
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How to price a cafe menu in Australia
Pricing a cafe menu is part maths, part psychology, and part understanding your suburb. Get the maths right and every dish carries its margin. Get the psychology right and the most profitable dishes are the ones customers order. Get the suburb right and your prices feel fair to the people who live and work nearby.
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How to write a cafe menu in Australia
A cafe menu is the only piece of marketing every customer reads. They look at it before they order, while they wait for their coffee, sometimes again before they leave. How it is written shapes what they order, what they remember, and whether they tell a friend.
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What food cost percentage should a cafe aim for?
Food cost percentage is the single most useful number a cafe owner tracks. Get it right and every dish on the menu pays its share of the rent. Get it wrong and the bestsellers quietly drain the bank account while looking like winners on the menu. The standard answer (25 to 35 percent) is a starting point, not the answer for your cafe.
Read guideThe Pass — food writing for cafe founders
The Pass | 2 Nov 2025
What makes the best eggs benedict?
There are very few dishes a cafe is judged on as carefully as eggs benedict. It is the brunch litmus test, the dish customers compare across cafes and remember when one version stands out. The four components are simple. The execution is anything but, and the cafes nailing it have built genuine regular custom on the back of one well-made plate.
The Pass | 9 Nov 2025
The hollandaise problem
Hollandaise is the most temperamental sauce on a cafe brunch menu. It splits, it cools, it grows bacteria, it dies under the heat lamp. The reasons it fails are predictable. The reasons cafes keep making it from scratch anyway are mostly emotional. There is a more honest conversation to be had about what good hollandaise looks like in a cafe doing 200 covers on a Saturday.
The Pass | 16 Nov 2025
The croque monsieur is the perfect cafe sandwich
Australia loves a sandwich. The cafe sandwich market is bigger than the brunch market and twice as competitive. In that market, the croque monsieur is overlooked. It should not be. It is one of the few sandwiches that is genuinely better in a cafe than at home, the technique is repeatable, and the margins (when costed correctly) are excellent.
The Pass | 23 Nov 2025
The arancini test
If you want to know whether a cafe kitchen is good, order the arancini. The dish has nowhere to hide. Every step (the risotto, the chill, the form, the crumb, the fry, the cheese pull) reveals something about how the kitchen thinks. Get even one wrong and the dish tells on itself the moment the customer cuts in.
The Pass | 30 Nov 2025
What makes overnight oats worth ordering
Overnight oats look like the easiest dish on a cafe menu. Soak oats in liquid, leave overnight, scoop into a bowl, top with fruit. The version customers come back for, though, comes down to a few small things the recipe never quite explains. The chia ratio. The whisk. The age of the mix. The toppings. Get those four right and the dish runs at 15 to 20 percent food cost while reading as generous on the plate.
The Pass | 7 Dec 2025
What makes a great Anzac biscuit chewy
Anzac biscuits are a sacred Australian item. Every cafe in the country sells them, especially around late April. The version worth selling is chewy, golden, and rich with caramelised golden syrup, and the difference between that biscuit and a harder, drier one comes down to a single moment in the method. The bicarb moment. Get that right and the rest of the recipe takes care of itself.
The Pass | 14 Dec 2025
The case for putting acai on your menu
Acai is a divisive ingredient in Australian cafes. To some operators, it reads as a wellness fad that peaked in 2018. To others, it is a quietly profitable menu item that draws a specific demographic the cafe was not previously catching. Both are partially right. The case for acai on the menu is not about trend chasing. It is about who orders it and how the economics work.
The Pass | 21 Dec 2025
The bowl that beats the salad
Cafe salads have a problem. Most of them are not very good. The lettuce is tired by 2pm, the dressing is overdone or underdone, the protein feels like an afterthought, and customers leave the table still hungry. The bowl format (warm grains as a base, layered components, generous protein) has quietly solved the problems salads created. The difference between a bowl and a salad is not just semantics. It is structural.
The Pass | 4 Jan 2026
Bruschetta is having a moment
Bruschetta got tired in Australian cafes around 2010. The format that defined the era (soft Turkish bread, watery tomato, balsamic glaze) could only ever go so far, and the dish quietly slipped off menus for over a decade. It is coming back now in a different shape, and the cafes putting bruschetta on the autumn menu have something genuinely worth ordering.
The Pass | 11 Jan 2026
The Mexican-Australian sandwich
There is a kind of dish that gets it half right by trying too hard. The Australian cafe attempt at authentic Mexican food is usually it. Tortillas hand-pressed by someone who learned from a YouTube video. Chillies sourced from a supplier who cannot guarantee they are chipotle. The result is a dish that is neither properly Mexican nor confidently Australian. There is a better path: stop trying to be authentic and start being honest about what is on the plate.
The Pass | 18 Jan 2026
Why the steak sandwich belongs on cafe lunch menus
The steak sandwich is one of the great Australian lunch dishes. Hot baguette, pink steak, soft caramelised onions, a butter that drips. It belongs on a cafe menu, and the cafes serving it well are quietly running one of the most rewarding lunch items there is. The technique that makes it work has been around longer than most people realise, and it is easier than it looks.
The Pass | 25 Jan 2026
What a rösti does for a breakfast plate
The rösti is one of those dishes that has been quietly winning ground on Australian cafe menus for years. A crisp brick of golden potato, sitting under the eggs or alongside the bacon, doing the work of a hash brown but doing it better. The dish is Swiss in origin, simple in construction, and once a kitchen learns the technique, it becomes a small but meaningful upgrade to the breakfast plate.
The Pass | 1 Feb 2026
What makes a great cafe pho
Pho is one of the great soups of the world. A clear, fragrant broth that has been on a slow simmer for half a day, paper-thin slices of raw beef cooked only by the heat of the broth as it meets the bowl, flat rice noodles, a side plate of fresh herbs and chilli and lime. The cafes that have started serving it are giving their lunch menu something quietly extraordinary, and the technique to do it well is older and simpler than it looks.
The Pass | 8 Feb 2026
Why your folded omelette doesn't puff
A great folded omelette is a small piece of theatre. Pale yellow and puffed, just set in the centre, melted Gruyère pulling between the layers, a slice of toasted sourdough beside it. It is one of the more impressive things a cafe can plate before the coffee has cooled. The cafes serving great ones know a few things about aeration, heat and the lid that the rest of the trade quietly skips.
The Pass | 15 Feb 2026
The tartlet that earns its cabinet space
The cabinet is the most expensive square metre in a cafe. Every tray on it has to earn its place against every other tray, every day. The dishes that win that fight are the ones that batch cleanly, hold their quality through service, look beautiful under glass, and sell on a small footprint at a high margin. The classic lemon tartlet is one of the cleanest examples of all four.
The Pass | 22 Feb 2026
Shakshuka belongs on the brunch menu
Shakshuka has been on the cafe brunch menu in Australia for around fifteen years and has earned its place quietly, dish by dish, in the kind of cafes that take a Saturday morning seriously. A small bubbling pan of spiced tomato sauce with two soft eggs poached into it, scattered with feta and fresh parsley, served with a couple of slices of toasted sourdough on the side. It is generous, it is vegetarian, it is halal, and the sauce can be made on a Wednesday for a Saturday rush.
The Pass | 1 Mar 2026
Putting a vegan breakfast pot on the menu
There are only a handful of vegan breakfast dishes that work on a cafe cabinet at scale. A chia pudding pot, layered with coconut yoghurt, fresh mango and toasted nuts, is one of them. Done well, it is one of the more rewarding cabinet items a cafe can run: prep-ahead, photogenic, generously portioned, dietary-confident, and aimed at a customer who will pay full price for a breakfast that is genuinely made for them.
The Pass | 8 Mar 2026
Why the cabinet wants a raspberry loaf
Raspberries hit their Australian peak in late spring and roll through summer, and the cafe cabinets that take their cake stand seriously change shape with the season. A coconut and raspberry loaf with a glossy lime glaze on top is one of the better moves for those months. It looks like the season on a plate, it cuts cleanly into ten generous slices, and the freezer technique that cafes have used for years means it runs through the cooler months as well.
The Pass | 15 Mar 2026
The cheese that squeaks
Halloumi is one of the few cheeses on an Australian cafe menu that does something genuinely unusual. It has a trick no other cheese has, and it is a sensory one. Cooked properly, it squeaks against your teeth. That squeak is the test, and the cooks who pay attention to it are the ones who get halloumi right every time.