Free Strategic Framework · 2026
🍽️

The Restaurant
Strategy Canvas 2.0

Everyone eats. Everyone can understand strategy — if you explain it the right way.

Mission + Ingredients + Recipe + Signature Dish + Pricing + Review = Winning Strategy
A message from the creator
Most people think strategy
is complicated.
It's not. You just need
the right metaphor.
After years teaching strategy to executives and students across industries, I found the same wall every time: the moment you say "value chain", "competitive advantage", or "Jobs to be Done", eyes glaze over.

But everyone understands the difference between a cook and a chef. Everyone knows what makes a restaurant worth returning to. And everyone can feel the difference between a forgettable dish and a signature one.

Strategy is not an academic exercise. It is a theory of how your business creates, delivers, and captures value — under uncertainty, competition, and constant change. This canvas makes that concrete, visual, and actionable for anyone building or running a business.
"The hardest part of building a strategy is not the analysis. It is the honesty — to acknowledge what you are actually good at, who you are really serving, and what tradeoffs you are willing to make. This canvas forces that conversation."
F
Felipe Afanador Cortés
Founder & Principal Consultant · AFCO Consulting & Associates
Felipe Afanador Cortés · Why strategy is like cooking · 30 sec
Choose your format
Three ways to use the canvas
Reference Edition
📋
Canvas with Questions
Guided prompts for each block
  • Full strategic questions for every block
  • Chef's tips that connect metaphor to strategy
  • Coherence test to validate your thinking
  • Best for: self-study and session preparation
Blank Edition
✏️
Canvas to Print
Clean writing space for workshops
  • Block names and guiding questions only
  • Ruled lines in every section
  • Company / facilitator / date meta row
  • Best for: classroom and in-person sessions
Interactive Edition
💡
Canvas to Fill Online
Type, save and export your strategy
  • Type directly into every block
  • Auto-saves to your browser
  • Export and reload as JSON file
  • Best for: remote teams and async work
The 6 blocks of the canvas
Block 1
🍽️
Kitchen Mission
Why does your restaurant exist — and who are you cooking for?
Block 2
🥩
The Ingredients
What unique assets do you bring to the kitchen?
Block 3
📖
The Recipe
How do you combine your ingredients to create value?
Block 4
🍴
The Signature Dish
What do customers experience — and why would they come back?
Block 5
💰
The Menu & Pricing
How do you capture a fair share of the value you create?
Block 6
The Review & Next Season
How do you taste your dish, learn, and improve the recipe?
The Strategy Loop
♾️
From Concept to Table — and Back to the Kitchen
A strategy is never finished. Like a great restaurant, it evolves every season.
How to use it
Three ways to run a session
1
Prepare the kitchen
Open the Reference Canvas before the session. Read each block, gather your thinking, form your hypotheses. A chef plans the menu before service begins.
2
Cook with the team
Print the Blank Canvas. Work block by block with students or your team. Write by hand, debate, challenge assumptions, decide. Strategy is a contact sport.
3
Plate and share
Open the Interactive Canvas, type your conclusions, save as JSON, export to PDF. Share with stakeholders. Then come back next season and improve the recipe.

About AFCO Consulting

We help organizations, entrepreneurs and students build clearer, more coherent business strategies. The Restaurant Strategy Canvas 2.0 is one of our core teaching and consulting frameworks — free to use for educational and non-commercial purposes.

www.afcoconsulting.com  ·  felipe@afcoconsulting.com