How to calculate food cost percentage (with a free calculator)

Food cost calculator

Use the first tab for one dish, the second for a week or a month. Amounts work in any currency. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

The two food cost numbers, and why you need both

Kitchens use "food cost" for two different things, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion.

Dish food cost (also called theoretical or recipe food cost) is what a dish should cost if every portion is made to the recipe at today's supplier prices. You calculate it from the recipe: each ingredient's quantity times its price, added up. It tells you whether a menu price makes sense.

Actual food cost is what food really cost you over a period. You get it from your stock count and your invoices:

(opening stock + purchases − closing stock) ÷ food sales × 100

With the numbers in the calculator's second tab: (4,200 + 18,600 − 3,900) ÷ 58,000 = 18,900 ÷ 58,000 = 32.6%.

The gap between the two is the interesting part. If your recipes say 28% and your month says 33%, five points of sales are disappearing somewhere between the delivery door and the plate. On sales of 58,000 that is about 2,900 a month.

How to cost one dish, step by step

1. Write the recipe down for one portion. Every ingredient, in grams, millilitres or pieces, including sauces, garnish and the oil in the pan. Small items add up.
2. Use the latest invoice price, not the price you remember. Divide the pack price by the pack size to get a price per kilo, litre or piece.
3. Correct for yield. You pay for the whole onion, the whole fish, the whole bag of lettuce, but only part of it reaches the plate. If 1 kg of lettuce gives 750 g usable leaves, the real price per usable kilo is the invoice price ÷ 0.75. Our yield test guide shows how to measure it.
4. Multiply and add up. Quantity × usable price for each line, then the total. That is the plate cost.
5. Divide by the price without VAT. That is the food cost percentage.

Our free recipe costing template does steps 2 to 5 for you in Excel or Google Sheets.

What is a good food cost percentage?

Many independent restaurants aim for roughly 28–35% across the menu, but the right number depends on what you sell. Burgers, pizza, pasta and coffee usually run lower. Steak, seafood and fresh juice bars usually run higher. A steakhouse at 38% can be healthier than a pizzeria at 30%.

That is why the percentage alone can mislead you. A dish with a high food cost can still leave more money per plate than a cheap one. Compare a 12.00 steak at 40% (it leaves 7.20) with a 6.00 pasta at 25% (it leaves 4.50). The steak "looks worse" and earns more. Look at contribution, the money left after the ingredients, next to the percentage. The menu matrix combines contribution with how often each dish sells.

Five mistakes that make food cost look better than it is

• Dividing by the price with VAT. VAT is not your money. A 9.35 menu price with 10% VAT is 8.50 to you. Using 9.35 makes a 27.8% dish look like 25.2%.
• Costing recipes once and never again. Supplier prices move every week. A recipe costed in spring is wrong by autumn, usually in the wrong direction.
• Ignoring yield and trim. Costing chicken at the invoice price when a third of it is lost to trimming and cooking understates the dish by a third.
• Forgetting the small lines. Oil, butter, salt, sauces, garnish, bread on the side. Each is cents. Together they can be 5–10% of the plate.
• Treating delivery like dine-in. On delivery apps the commission comes off the price before you see it, so the same plate cost is a bigger share of what you keep. What a Wolt order really leaves you works through an example.

Why actual food cost is higher than your recipes say

When the monthly number is above the recipe number, the usual causes are, roughly in order: portions bigger than the recipe, waste and spoilage, staff meals and comps that aren't recorded, supplier prices that went up without anyone re-costing, and invoices for things that were never delivered. Each needs a different fix, which is why it pays to know which one it is before you raise prices.

Doing this by hand works for a few dishes. It gets hard when you have a hundred ingredients and supplier prices change every week. At Vega Fresh Bar in Skopje, around 300 supplier invoices arrive every month. FoodNormIQ reads each one, updates the price of every ingredient on it and re-costs every recipe that uses it, so the food cost of each dish is right the morning after the delivery.