Free recipe costing template for Excel and Google Sheets

What's in the template

Four tabs, in the order you'll use them.

• Start here. A one-page guide and the definitions behind every column.
• Ingredients. One row per product you buy: supplier, pack size, unit, pack price without VAT and usable yield. The sheet works out the cost per usable kilo, litre or piece.
• Recipes. One row per ingredient in each dish, with the quantity for one portion. The cost per unit is pulled from the Ingredients tab, so you never type a price twice.
• Menu. One row per dish with its menu price and VAT rate. You get the plate cost, food cost %, contribution per portion, the price that would bring the dish to your target, and a status: on target or price below target.

Here's what the Menu tab shows for the sample kitchen, with a 30% food cost target:

How to fill it in

1. Set your target. On the Menu tab, type your target food cost percentage in the yellow cell at the top. Many independent kitchens aim for 28–35%.
2. List your ingredients. Take your last invoices and enter each product with the pack size and the price without VAT. Start with the 20 products you spend most on. They usually cover most of your food spend.
3. Add the yield. Enter the share of each product that reaches the plate: 1 for minced meat or bread, around 0.9 for onions, 0.6–0.75 for things you trim, peel or drain. Weigh it once to be sure. The yield test takes ten minutes.
4. Write each recipe for one portion. On the Recipes tab, one row per ingredient. Use the same unit as the Ingredients tab: if the onion is bought by the kilo, 20 g is 0.02.
5. Add your menu. On the Menu tab, enter each dish with its menu price and VAT rate. The dish name must match the Recipes tab exactly.

If a cell on the Recipes tab says not found, the ingredient name is spelled differently from the Ingredients tab. Fix the spelling and the cost appears.

Blue text on a yellow cell is for you to type in. Black text is calculated. Green text is pulled from another tab. Overwrite the sample rows with your own; there is room for 120 ingredients, 400 recipe lines and 80 dishes.

The three numbers to look at first

Food cost % tells you whether a price is in line with your target. Anything well above target is a candidate for a new price, a smaller portion or a cheaper ingredient. Our food cost percentage guide explains the formula and the common mistakes.

Contribution is the money each portion leaves after ingredients. It is what pays wages and rent. Two dishes at the same percentage can leave very different amounts per plate, so sort by contribution too.

Price for target is the menu price that would bring the dish to your target. You don't have to charge it. But if it is far above what you can charge, the recipe needs work, not the price.

Keeping it up to date

A recipe costing sheet is only as good as its prices. When an invoice shows a new price, change the pack price on the Ingredients tab and every dish updates. Make it a habit: once a week, go through the week's invoices and update anything that moved.

That habit is where most kitchens stop, because it takes hours. At Vega Fresh Bar in Skopje, about 300 supplier invoices arrive every month, from 71 suppliers, some handwritten. That is why we built FoodNormIQ: it reads every invoice as it arrives, updates the ingredient prices and re-costs every recipe the same morning. The template is the manual version of the same idea, and a good place to start.