5-Out
5-Out is an AI forecasting platform for restaurants. It predicts sales hour by hour and item by item, then turns those predictions into prep lists, purchase orders, inventory pars and staff schedules automatically.
What is 5-Out?
5-Out is a forecasting and automation platform built for restaurants by 5 Out Solutions, Inc., a New York company. Its machine learning models read a venue's own history — sales and guest patterns, day-part and menu-mix behaviour, seasonality, day-of-week effects — and combine it with external signals such as weather and locally relevant events to predict what that venue will sell. Forecasts are produced at hourly, daily and weekly granularity.
What separates it from a reporting tool is what happens next. The forecast is not the deliverable, it is the input. From it, 5-Out generates prep lists sized to the day ahead, Smart Pars that raise and lower inventory targets with demand rather than by fixed rule, purchase recommendations derived from recipes and expected volume, and labour schedules aligned to predicted hourly traffic. The company sums this up as action, not insights: traditional dashboards explain what happened, 5-Out states what to do next.
Eight capabilities are advertised — AI sales forecasting, automated prep lists, Smart Pars, automated purchasing recommendations, inventory management, recipe management, labour forecasting and optimisation, and food cost visibility. A recipe database ties ingredients, yields and conversions to individual menu items, which is what allows purchasing to be computed rather than estimated.
Data arrives through fifteen named integrations instead of manual entry: POS systems (Toast, Square, Aloha, PAR Brink, Micros, Simphony), cost and inventory tools (MarginEdge, MarketMan, Craftable, xtraCHEF, Restaurant365), scheduling and time systems (7shifts, Harri), and events and reservations (Tripleseat, SevenRooms). Onboarding is described as a four-day sequence beginning with POS permissions.
The platform addresses quick-service, fast casual, full-service and multi-unit operators, from a single venue to several hundred, as well as franchise groups. Inside a restaurant it is used by general managers, kitchen managers, inventory leads, multi-unit leaders and owners, and every recommendation stays editable. Published customer results include a 6.5% improvement in cost of goods and 375,000 USD of added net profit at one quick-service group. The company itself grew out of the financial models two operators built for their own restaurant in 2013.
What it does
- Forecast sales, guest counts and item-level demand by hour, day and week
- Generate prep lists sized to the volume actually expected that day
- Recommend purchase quantities computed from recipes and forecast demand
- Set Smart Pars, inventory levels that move with demand instead of fixed rules
- Build labour budgets and schedules from predicted hourly demand
- Track inventory usage, variance and food cost pressure points
- Surface real-time Smart Actions from live sales and labour data
When to use 5-Out / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if 5-Out is the right fit.
When to use 5-Out
- Multi-unit restaurant groups and franchise operators watching prime costs across every location
- General managers who build schedules and purchase orders from next week's expected demand
- Kitchen managers and chefs who would rather work from a daily prep list than from memory
- Inventory leads accountable for on-hand levels, usage variance and food cost percentage
- Quick-service, fast casual and high-volume specialty concepts such as pizza, coffee and bakery
When not to use 5-Out
- Restaurants without a supported POS, since every forecast starts from that connection
- Newly opened venues with no sales history for the model to learn from
- Operators looking for a free tool: the cheapest plan costs 50 USD per location per month
- Businesses outside food service, because every output assumes a restaurant
- Teams outside the United States: pricing, integrations and the terms of service all point to the US market
How to use 5-Out
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Request a demo and walk through your current setup with the team
- Share how your POS, labour and inventory systems are configured
- Grant POS permissions, which is day one of the published onboarding sequence
- Connect the remaining systems your plan covers: labour, inventory and cost management
- Load clean recipe data, since purchasing recommendations are computed from it
- Share staff lists and your labour and food cost percentage targets
- Review the first forecast before acting on it
- Put the automated prep lists and Smart Pars into daily kitchen use
- Order against the purchase recommendations and build schedules from predicted demand
- Review forecast accuracy weekly and track your KPIs over the first weeks
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Pricing is published tier by tier with a full feature matrix, which is uncommon in restaurant software
- Forecasting feeds the whole chain: prep, purchasing, inventory and scheduling live in one tool
- Fifteen named integrations covering the main North American POS and cost systems
- Recommendations remain editable and managers keep the final call
- A serious encryption posture on paper: AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, VPC isolation
- The founding team pairs a working restaurateur with a former Citibank SVP and a computer science PhD
- Subscriptions can be cancelled at any time from the billing portal, absent a long-term contract
Cons
- No free plan and no free trial: the entry point is 50 USD per location per month
- Fees stack up on the Pro tier, with 100 USD onboarding and 99 USD per integration
- GDPR is never mentioned, and there is no DPA, no subprocessor list and no EU representative
- The terms state that aggregated customer data trains the models, with no documented way to opt out
- Both legal documents have been left untouched since 21 June 2022
- No third-party certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and no hosting country disclosed
- No public API or developer documentation, and item-level forecasting is capped at 10 days and 50 items on Pro
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan and no free trial. The lowest paid entry point is 50.00 USD per location per month on the Starter tier, billed monthly and charged automatically at the start of each period, with payments stated as non-refundable. The pricing page advertises a saving on annual billing without publishing the amount, and the FAQ notes that the final quote depends on the number of locations, the modules chosen and operational complexity.
- Starter — 50 USD per location per month. Free onboarding
- no integration fee
- POS connection only. Includes revenue forecasts
- automated labour budgets and automated purchasing budgets.
- Pro — 150 USD per location per month. 100 USD onboarding and 99 USD per integration. Covers POS
- labour
- inventory and COGS management
- and adds item-level forecasting limited to 10 days and 50 items
- hourly labour demand planning
- the scheduler
- automated order guides
- automated prep lists and the recipe database.
- Premium — custom pricing
- onboarding quoted individually
- integrations included. Covers POS
- labour
- inventory and COGS plus weather
- events and custom connectors
- with unlimited item-level forecasting
- ingredient-level forecasting
- Annual billing is presented as cheaper than monthly billing
- but the discount is not published.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how 5-Out handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is none. A search across every page collected — homepage, solutions, pricing, terms, privacy policy and FAQ, in rendered text and in archived HTML alike — returns no occurrence of GDPR, of the General Data Protection Regulation, of CCPA or of a data protection officer. No Article 27 representative is named, no Data Processing Agreement is published or offered, and no subprocessor list exists. There is no statement of legal basis and no described right of access, rectification or portability. The single right the privacy policy grants is deletion on request, within one week. The terms restrict individual users to United States residents, apply the law of the State of New York and send disputes to arbitration in the United States. Both documents were last updated on 21 June 2022. European readers should treat this record as silent on the subject, not as compliant.
Who owns the data?
Neither the terms nor the privacy policy claims ownership of your data. 5 Out Solutions, Inc. presents itself as needing access to sales, labour, purchasing, recipe, inventory, vendor and financial records, plus staff names, emails and phone numbers. Individual data is not disclosed to third parties, though the two documents word this differently: the privacy policy says never, under any circumstances, while the terms say not without your explicit consent. Only aggregates circulate, and the threshold also differs between the two texts, at five restaurants across five customers in one and ten restaurants across five customers in the other. Deletion is granted on written request within one week.
Reuse rights
Your inputs remain yours. Nothing in the terms restricts what you do with your own POS, recipe or inventory records, and the outputs the platform produces — forecasts, budgets, prep lists, purchase recommendations and schedules — exist to be used in daily service. Managers are explicitly allowed to override them: the FAQ states that teams keep full control over prep quantities, labour guidance and ordering, and can adjust for local context the model has not seen. Two limits apply. The vendor disclaims any warranty on forecast accuracy, so the operator carries responsibility for the decision. And the 5-Out marks and logos are excluded from any implied licence to use.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
5-Out publishes no hosting location. Neither the privacy policy nor the terms names a country, a region or a cloud provider for the platform's data. What is described is the protection applied to it: customer data is encrypted with AES-256, segregated in the database, and kept behind a VPC firewall reachable only by 5-Out's own integrations and web services. Traffic is protected in transit by SSL with TLS 1.3. The vendor commits to notifying customers within five days of any identified potential breach, and to purging data from databases, file storage and physical records within one week of a deletion request. No subprocessor is named, no Data Processing Agreement is offered and no third-party audit such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is claimed. The marketing site resolves to a Wix CDN node geolocated in the United States, but that is an anycast edge serving the public website and says nothing about where platform data lives. The governing law is that of the State of New York, with arbitration in the United States.
Where 5-Out works
Country-level availability.
Available in
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting 5-Out.
- Forecast accuracy is explicitly not guaranteed by the terms, yet purchasing and staffing decisions rest on it
- Following recommendations without question erodes the operational judgement that catches what a model cannot see
- The data handed over is sensitive: sales, finances, recipes and suppliers, plus staff names, emails and phone numbers
- Aggregated customer data trains the vendor's models with no documented way to opt out
- The privacy policy and the terms disagree on the anonymisation threshold, which weakens the guarantee both are meant to give
- Under-staffing on a low forecast falls on the team working the shift, not on the software
- Recipes, pars and operating history concentrate in a platform with no public API to get them back out
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low on paper, moderate in practice. There is nothing to install, the platform runs in the browser, and connections are made through ready-made integrations rather than manual entry; the site advertises integration in five minutes and a four-day onboarding. The real effort sits elsewhere. Someone with POS administrator rights must grant permissions, staff lists and cost targets have to be supplied, and the recipe database will not fill itself. Clean POS and recipe data are stated prerequisites. On the Pro tier, each additional integration costs 99 USD.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind 5-Out
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does 5-Out actually do?
How much does it cost?
Is there a free plan or a free trial?
Which systems does it connect to?
How long does setup take?
Does it make sense for a single restaurant?
Can managers override the recommendations?
Is customer data used to train the models?
What does the platform say about GDPR?
Can my data be deleted?
Should you pick 5-Out?
5-Out is a narrow tool, and that is its strength. It does one thing — predict what a restaurant will sell — then refuses to stop there, pushing the forecast into prep lists, purchase orders, inventory pars and schedules. Operators who have watched dashboards explain last week's losses will recognise the difference immediately.
The commercial side is unusually transparent for this category. Two of the three tiers carry published prices, 50 and 150 USD per location per month, and the feature matrix states plainly what each one includes. The integration list is short, named, and dominated by the systems North American restaurants actually run.
The compliance side is where the record thins out. GDPR is never mentioned, no Data Processing Agreement is offered, no subprocessor list exists, no third-party certification is claimed and no hosting country is disclosed. The terms state that customer data is used in aggregate to train the models, and no opt-out is documented. Both legal documents have been frozen since June 2022 while the product has visibly moved on, and they disagree with each other on the anonymisation threshold — five restaurants in the privacy policy, ten in the terms.
Practically, this suits a North American operator with a supported POS, clean recipe data and the discipline to use the system every day. Value grows with history, so a brand-new opening will wait. A European group would have to ask, in writing, questions the site does not answer.
For a multi-unit group already losing margin to over-prep and mistimed labour, the entry price is small against the problem it addresses. For anyone whose procurement starts with a security questionnaire, expect a conversation before a contract.
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