English Article

Working backward from the next morning’s health check, the eating cutoff was 11:45 p.m. Unfortunately, that was exactly when I was in the bath.

Author: Mendoi-chan

The Night Before a Health Check, I Calculated Buffet Food Costs and Made Fasting Worse

1. The “last supper” closed while I was in the bath

Working backward from the next morning’s health check, the eating cutoff was 11:45 p.m. Unfortunately, that was exactly when I was in the bath.

By the time I got out, the last-supper window was gone. The refrigerator still existed and the food was still edible, but eating before measurements such as fasting glucose and triglycerides was a bad plan.

So my brain chose the worst possible activity: researching what to eat after the health check.

Menus while fasting. Price comparisons while fasting. Thoughts of salad, pineapple, and coffee jelly while fasting. Self-inflicted food advertising.

Japanese Ministry of Health guidance for morning specific health examinations says that, to avoid affecting fasting glucose and triglycerides, no food or drink other than water should be consumed for at least ten hours beforehand. If the actual examination provider gives different instructions, those instructions take priority.

That is also why “surely unsweetened barley tea is fine” is not the safest default. Water is the simplest conservative choice.

Anya has become a water-type creature.

2. Why booking a post-check meal is strangely stressful

After fasting, you want food immediately. The problem is that registration, blood sampling, electrocardiography, chest X-ray, medical examination, and waiting lines can all shift the finishing time. A strict restaurant reservation can therefore create a new form of stress: being hungry while watching the clock.

That led to BRONCO BILLY lunch.

As of September 1, 2026, the official menu lists lunch until 4 p.m. The Billy Hamburger Lunch costs ¥1,133 including tax. Adding the lunch BRONCO Buffet costs ¥638, for a total of ¥1,771. The standalone lunch buffet costs ¥1,188.

The funny part is that meat was not the main objective. The real targets were salad, pineapple, and coffee jelly—especially about three servings of coffee jelly.

But the difference between ¥1,188 and ¥1,771 is only ¥583.

“If meat is only five-hundred-something yen extra, take the meat.”

The hamburger was suddenly hired.

3. Supermarket ¥1,500 versus BRONCO BILLY ¥1,771

A rough supermarket basket for the same cravings looked like this:

Cut pineapple: ¥450
Coffee jelly: ¥100 × 3 = ¥300
Prepared salad: ¥250 × 3 = ¥750
Total: ¥1,500

The hamburger lunch plus buffet costs ¥1,771. Difference: ¥271.

In that comparison, another ¥271 buys the main dish, unlimited buffet refills, and the lunch page also advertises rice and soup refills.

A supermarket is strong when you want exact products in exact quantities to take home. A buffet is strong when you want small portions of many foods, the option to take more, and no cooking or dishwashing.

That ¥271 is therefore not merely an ingredient-price difference. It buys variety, preparation, service, cleanup, and optionality.

4. What actually “recovers cost” at a buffet?

At this point the cost-recovery logic became economically unserious.

“If it is unlimited anyway, shouldn’t I eat the ingredients that cost the restaurant the most?”

First, BRONCO BILLY does not disclose the purchase price of each buffet ingredient. Nobody outside the company can honestly state the actual yen cost of its pineapple, cheese, jelly, or salad vegetables.

Company-wide cost of sales is also not the ingredient cost of one diner. BRONCO BILLY reported consolidated sales of ¥30.219 billion for the year ended December 2025, and public financial data show a cost-of-sales ratio of about 32.8 percent. That does not mean a ¥1,771 diner necessarily consumes about ¥580 of food.

For a buffet game, price per 100 grams is not enough. A better approximation is:

Recovery power = ingredient value × amount you can comfortably eat

Powdered cheese may be expensive per gram, but eating 100 grams is unpleasant. Pineapple may be cheaper per gram, yet it is fruit and easy to eat in meaningful amounts. Coffee jelly can look expensive in individual retail cups, but it contains a lot of water and may have modest raw-material cost for a restaurant.

Retail price and restaurant ingredient cost are different concepts.

5. Powdered cheese, pineapple, coffee jelly, tiramisu, croutons, and shrimp crackers

Powdered cheese

A strong candidate. Cheese is a processed dairy product and generally carries more ingredient value than leafy vegetables or starch-heavy snacks. QBB even sells commercial cheese powder in a 20-kilogram format.

BRONCO BILLY itself recommends making a Caesar-style salad with Caesar dressing, croutons, and cheese.

“Put a lot of powdered cheese on the salad.”

Economically, the direction makes sense. Nutritionally, there is no need to recover unlimited sodium and fat as well.

Pineapple

Excellent practical performance. Fruit tends to feel expensive at retail, while pineapple is sweet, juicy, and easy to eat in volume. If you regularly pay several hundred yen for cut pineapple, unlimited access has obvious consumer value.

Coffee jelly

High emotional return, probably low food-cost attack power. Jelly is mostly water. But the objective is not to defeat the restaurant. If three servings make the meal better, the customer has already won.

Tiramisu

BRONCO Buffet offerings vary by time of day and season. A dairy-and-cream dessert such as tiramisu will generally use more costly ingredients than a simple jelly, but actual availability and recipes must be checked against the current menu.

Croutons

Deceptive. Commercial croutons can look costly per kilogram, but each piece is extremely light, and they fill the stomach quickly. In a cost-recovery game, stomach capacity is a scarce resource, so dry bread is not an obvious top strategy.

Shrimp crackers

The trap.

One commercial example from Marumatsu Bussan contains about 120 uncooked crackers in a 227-gram pack, with 30 packs per case. The main ingredients are cassava starch and wheat starch.

They expand dramatically when fried.

“I filled the plate with shrimp crackers. The restaurant is finished.”

The restaurant: “You ate volume.”

“Shrimp crackers are cheap!”

That was the cleanest punch line in the investigation.

6. In 2026 the old salad bar became a broader buffet

On April 1, 2026, BRONCO BILLY renewed its long-running salad bar as the BRONCO Buffet. The company describes four categories and more than 20 items, with offerings varying by time of day. Lunch focuses on gourmet salads and desserts prepared in the restaurant.

As of September 1, 2026, the summer buffet was still current. Official seasonal items included Tex-Mex-style salad pasta with pork, glass noodles with Okinawan mozuku seaweed, lettuce and tofu salad with Caesar dressing, and guava-and-passion-fruit tropical jelly. The autumn buffet was scheduled to begin on September 4.

Seasonal salads containing pork or shrimp may be more interesting than plain leaves from a food-cost perspective, but pasta and glass noodles are inexpensive bulk components. “Contains meat” does not automatically mean “high food cost.”

The strongest strategy remains boringly sensible: eat small portions of what you actually enjoy and take more only when you want more.

7. Looking for manufacturer-direct purchases revealed that BRONCO BILLY is partly the manufacturer

Then came the next idea: “Can I buy these things directly from the manufacturer?”

Buying similar food from a discount wholesaler is easy. That is not fun. The fun version is finding the restaurant’s backstage supply chain.

The investigation showed that BRONCO BILLY is vertically integrated. According to the company, its own factories process products including steaks, hamburgers, cakes, and gelato for distribution to stores. Sauces and dressings are produced within the group by Matsuya Sakae Foods, which became a subsidiary in 2022.

Its official online shop sells BRONCO raw sauce and Japanese dressing for ¥350 each, or ¥4,000 for a 12-bottle case.

The plan was: “Find the manufacturer that supplies BRONCO and buy cheaply.”

Result:

The manufacturer is also part of the BRONCO family.

Commercial shrimp crackers and cheese powders can certainly be bought in large formats, but that does not prove that a specific product is BRONCO BILLY’s actual supplier. Observing the food-service market and identifying a chain’s supplier are different claims.

8. Bulk buying lowers unit cost—and can lower happiness

Twenty kilograms of cheese powder. Thirty bags of shrimp crackers. Twelve bottles of dressing.

Commercial formats absolutely reduce unit cost.

Then one sentence destroys the optimization model:

“I’d get bored.”

Exactly.

The value of a buffet is not merely a low cost per gram.

A little salad. A little pineapple. Three coffee jellies. Some croutons if you feel like it. A different dessert at another time. Then stop when you are done.

You are buying optionality.

Recreating the same variety at home means half-used packages in the refrigerator, repeated meals, dishes to wash, and greater risk of food waste.

Commercial purchasing optimizes unit price. Buffets optimize variety, convenience, and satisfaction. They solve different objective functions.

9. Conclusion: the real “recovery” is satisfaction, not the restaurant’s food cost

The sequence was simple. Fasting starts before a health check. Hunger appears. Food research begins. BRONCO BILLY enters the picture. The supermarket version costs about ¥1,500. The restaurant version costs ¥1,771. “Only ¥271 more? Fine.”

Then somehow it becomes an investigation into food costs. Powdered cheese looks strong. Pineapple looks useful. Three coffee jellies are an act of love. Shrimp crackers are starch wearing a large-volume costume. Manufacturer-direct purchasing is investigated. BRONCO turns out to manufacture much of its own ecosystem. Bulk cases exist.