Guide
What to gather, what order to do it in, and what to change once you know.
This is the guide, not the tool. If you would rather start typing, the cafe food cost calculator has a latte already costed and waiting. If you would rather understand the shape of the job before you begin, read on — it takes about ten minutes and will save you several hours of doing it in the wrong order.
Costing a cafe menu is not one task. It is four: gathering accurate prices, establishing what a portion actually is, doing the arithmetic, and then deciding what to change. Most people start at the third step, discover their prices are six months old and their portions are whatever the person on shift felt like, and abandon the whole thing. Doing the first two properly makes the third trivial and the fourth obvious.
Everything here is written for a small independent cafe. There is no software to buy and nothing to install. A phone, your last delivery invoice, and a kitchen scale will do the entire job.
1
Take your most recent delivery invoices, not a price list and not memory. Write down the price and the pack size for every ingredient you buy — a kilo of beans, a litre of milk, a 750 ml bottle of syrup, a sleeve of 50 cups. Note the date. Prices move, and an undated costing is one you cannot trust next quarter.
2
Weigh and measure what actually goes into a drink on a normal shift, not what the recipe card says. Dose the espresso, pour the milk into a jug and read it, count the pumps. Do this for your five best sellers. The gap between the recipe and reality is where the money goes.
3
Enter each drink into the calculator: beans by the kilo with the dose in grams, milk by the litre with the pour in millilitres, syrup by the bottle with the pump in millilitres. Put cups, lids and sleeves in the Advanced panel as packaging so they stay separate from food.
4
Look at gross profit in pesos per cup, not just the percentage. Multiply by how many you sell in a week. The drink with the best percentage is often not the drink making you the most money, and that is the single most useful thing this exercise reveals.
5
Pick the biggest line on your biggest seller — usually milk or packaging — and change one thing. Negotiate the price, reduce waste at the pitcher, or switch the cup. Then recost and check the difference is real before moving on to the next.
Milk costs more than coffee. In almost every milk-based drink, the milk line is larger than the bean line, often substantially. Cafes that have spent months negotiating bean prices have usually been optimising the smaller number.
Packaging is enormous on cheap drinks. A 12-peso cup on a 60-peso iced tea is twenty per cent of the price before a single ingredient.
Waste is invisible and large. Milk left in the pitcher, shots pulled and dumped, syrup free-poured instead of pumped. None of it appears in any document you already have.
Rank your drinks by gross profit in pesos multiplied by weekly volume. That ordering, not the percentage ordering, tells you which drinks the business actually runs on.
Protect the top of that list. Do not discount those drinks, do not bury them at the bottom of the menu, and make sure every member of staff can make them consistently.
For anything near the bottom, decide deliberately: improve it, reprice it, or remove it. A menu item that neither sells nor earns is costing you stock, training and space on the board.
Your five best sellers take about an hour once you have invoices and a scale. A full menu of twenty-five items is a comfortable afternoon, and the top five give you most of the value.
Only if it is milk, your main coffee, or packaging. Those three touch nearly every item. A change to a syrup you use in two drinks a week can wait for the quarterly review.
Cost them once so you know they are not losing money, then leave them. Effort is better spent on the items you sell hundreds of times a week.
Yes, and it is often where the problem is. Food usually runs a much higher food cost than drinks, and a cafe with strong drink margins can still be pulled down by a pastry programme nobody has looked at.
