How We Offset NI Hikes by Cutting Supplier Costs
If you haven’t looked at your supplier prices in months, it’s probably costing you more than you think.
From April 2025, UK hospitality operators are being hit with higher National Insurance contributions for employees—an unavoidable overhead increase that squeezes already tight margins. But rather than cutting hours or raising prices (again), one of the best ways to protect your bottom line is to go straight to the source: your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).
In this post, we’ll walk through how Double Puc cut our fruit & veg costs by over 12%—and completely offset the NI increase—using Percy, our AI-powered purchasing tool built specifically for hospitality.
🧠 The Hidden Cost of “Set and Forget” Supplier Relationships
Hospitality operators wear a dozen hats. Reviewing line-by-line supplier pricing usually doesn’t make it to the top of the list. So when existing suppliers raise prices gradually, or slip in new SKUs at higher price points, those increases often go unnoticed—until it's too late.
And let’s be honest:
Comparing suppliers is time-consuming.
Identifying better alternatives isn’t easy.
Most “purchasing consultancies” are slow, expensive, or opaque.
That’s exactly why we built and tested Percy on our own four-site operation before bringing it to the market.
📉 A Real Example: Saving 12% on Our Fruit & Veg Spend
We ran a full audit of our fresh produce spend using Percy. The platform took our entire SKU list and:
Matched every item to equivalent SKUs across multiple wholesalers
Benchmarked current prices against the wider market
Identified a new regional supplier we hadn’t worked with before
Forecasted annual savings based on exact product volumes
✅ Result: 12.5% savings on our fruit & veg spend
📉 That alone offset the NI increases across all four of our locations.
No painful spreadsheet marathons. No two-week negotiation cycles. No confusing rebates or vague “basket deals.” Just real numbers, mapped to real alternatives.
🔄 Why Consolidation Can Also Unlock Savings
While reviewing our supply chain, Percy also flagged that some of our existing suppliers had expanded their catalogues. This meant we could consolidate SKUs from three suppliers down to one, pushing us into higher-volume pricing tiers—another easy win we hadn’t spotted manually.
More spend with fewer suppliers = better leverage.
💡 It’s Not Just Food: Think Cleaning, Packaging & Disposables
COGS isn’t just food & drink. Percy also looks at spending from:
Cleaning products
Takeaway packaging
Disposables and chemicals
These categories are often overlooked but can add up to thousands per year in unnecessary overspend.
🧰 The Takeaway: Use Technology to Buy Smarter, Not Harder
If you’re facing rising NI costs and haven’t done a supplier review recently, now’s the time. Percy can help you:
Audit current pricing across all suppliers
Benchmark SKUs against a wider market
Identify smarter supplier consolidation opportunities
Unlock hidden savings without operational disruption
We built Percy to make this process faster, smarter, and far less painful—because we were tired of being overcharged and underserved ourselves.
💬 Ready to Find Hidden Savings in Your Supplier Spend?
Whether you’re running one kitchen or a multi-site operation, Percy makes it easy to buy better.
👉Try the Percy Cost saving Calculator
👉 Book a call or just upload your purchasing invoices / files here