Drinks, milk, syrups and cups
What does that drink cost you to pour?
Beans by the kilo, milk by the litre, syrup by the bottle — costed per cup.
Cafe costing is a units problem more than an arithmetic one. Beans arrive in kilos and leave in 18-gram doses. Milk arrives in litres and leaves in 200-millilitre pours. Syrup arrives in 750-millilitre bottles and leaves in 15-millilitre pumps. Cups, lids, sleeves and straws are counted in pieces and are a much larger share of a drink’s cost than most owners expect.
The calculator opens with a 12-ounce latte built exactly that way, including nine pesos of packaging. Change the dose, change the milk price, change the cup, and watch what happens. For most cafes the two numbers that move the answer are milk and packaging, not coffee — which is usually a surprise, and usually the most useful thing a first costing produces.
Drinks typically run a much lower food cost percentage than food, often well under 25 per cent. That is normal and it is not free money: a cafe’s real costs are rent, labour and the hours the seats sit empty. A healthy drink percentage tells you the recipe is sound, not that the business is.
Costing milk properly
milk cost per drink = price per litre / 1000 x millilitres poured
Fresh milk at 95 pesos a litre is 0.095 per millilitre, so a 200 ml latte carries 19 pesos of milk against roughly 16 pesos of coffee. Milk is usually the single largest ingredient line in a cafe, which is why steaming discipline and waste at the pitcher matter more than the bean price most owners obsess over.
If you pour a 350 ml pitcher and use 200, the other 150 is a cost unless it goes into the next drink. Set the yield percentage to reflect what you actually throw away and the number will tell you something uncomfortable and useful.
Packaging is not a rounding error
A cup, lid, sleeve and straw can easily reach nine to fifteen pesos. On a 150-peso latte that is up to ten per cent of the price, and on a 60-peso iced tea it can be a quarter of it.
Keep packaging in the Advanced panel rather than as an ingredient. It keeps your food cost percentage comparable with other cafes while still showing you the real cost per cup — and it makes the dine-in versus takeaway difference visible, which is a decision you can actually act on.
Syrups, pearls and the per-pump problem
Anything dispensed by pump or scoop should be costed by the measure you actually use, not by the container. A 750 ml syrup bottle at 350 pesos is 0.467 per millilitre; a 15 ml pump is 7 pesos. Two pumps in a drink you sell at 150 is a real line, and free-pouring syrup instead of pumping it is a real leak.
The calculator asks what a bottle holds rather than assuming, because a bottle is a container, not a unit of volume. The same applies to cans of condensed milk and boxes of tea.
Questions people actually ask
What food cost percentage should a cafe drink run at?
Espresso drinks commonly land between 12 and 22 per cent before packaging. Milk-heavy and pearl-heavy drinks run higher. Low percentages are normal in this category and do not mean the cafe is profitable — rent and labour decide that.
How do I cost a shot when beans are priced per kilo?
Enter the bean price per kilo and the dose in grams. An 18 gram dose from beans at 900 per kilo is 16.20, and the calculator does the conversion so you never divide by a thousand in your head.
Should I cost water, ice and cleaning?
Ice is worth costing where you buy it in. Water and cleaning belong in operating costs, not in a drink recipe, unless your production genuinely drives the bill.
How do I handle a drink sold in two sizes?
Cost them as two recipes. The milk, syrup and cup all change with size while the espresso dose often does not, so the larger size is usually a better margin in pesos and a worse one in percentage.
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Related
This calculator gives estimates based on what you enter. Real profitability also depends on labour, rent, utilities, taxes, delivery commissions, waste, discounts, and other operating costs.