Single-dish costing
What does this dish actually cost to make?
The shortest path from a supplier receipt to the true cost of one plate.
Food cost is the money that leaves your kitchen as ingredients when one plate leaves the pass. It sounds simple, and the arithmetic is simple, but almost every manual costing gets it wrong in one of three predictable ways: the units do not match, the waste is ignored, or the recipe on paper is not the recipe being cooked.
This page handles the first two for you and makes the third visible. Enter what you paid and what you used, in whatever units you actually buy and cook in. If you buy chicken by the kilo and use 120 grams, type exactly that. If you buy soy sauce by the bottle and use 20 millilitres, the calculator asks what the bottle holds rather than guessing, because a bottle has no intrinsic volume.
The result is a cost per serving you can defend line by line, and a food cost percentage that means something once you enter a selling price. Every row shows its own cost, so an ingredient that turns out to be a bigger share than you expected is obvious immediately — which, for most kitchens, is the actual value of doing this at all.
The formula, written out
food cost % = cost per serving / selling price x 100
A dish costing 60 pesos sold at 180 pesos runs a 33.3% food cost, leaves 120 pesos gross profit, and a 66.7% gross margin. Gross profit is the number that pays your rent, and it is measured in pesos, not percentages — which is why a cheap dish with a beautiful percentage can still be a bad dish to sell.
Three mistakes that flatter the number
Costing on purchase weight instead of usable weight. Trim, peel, bone and cooking loss are all real. A kilo of onions at 100 pesos with 15% waste is 117.65 per usable kilo, not 100.
Forgetting the invisible ingredients. Cooking oil, butter for the pan, salt, the second sauce, the garnish nobody counts. Individually small, collectively several percentage points.
Costing the recipe rather than the portion. If the recipe says 120 grams of protein and the kitchen serves 150 because it looks mean otherwise, your real food cost is 25% higher than your sheet says. Weigh what actually goes out for a week before you trust any costing.
Worked example, in pesos
A 12-inch margherita, costed line by line. Dough: 260 g at 78/kg is 20.28. Passata: 90 ml from a 680 ml bottle costing 120 is 15.88. Mozzarella: 140 g at 520/kg is 72.80. Basil: 5 g at 600/kg, but at a 70% yield after stalks that is 4.29, not 3.00. Total ingredients: 113.25.
Sold at 340 pesos that is a 33.3% food cost. Note where the money is: mozzarella alone is 64 per cent of the ingredient cost. Negotiating your flour price will achieve almost nothing here; a better cheese price, or two grams less per pizza, moves the whole number.
Add the 18-peso box and the cost per serving becomes 131.25, leaving 208.75 gross profit and a 61.4% gross margin. The food cost percentage on ingredients alone stays 33.3%, which is exactly why packaging is tracked separately rather than buried in the recipe.
Questions people actually ask
What is a good food cost percentage?
Many operators aim for 28 to 35 per cent, but there is no universal right answer. A high-volume cafe with low rent and a fine-dining room with a large brigade can both be healthy businesses at very different food costs. Treat any benchmark as a starting point for a conversation, not a target handed down.
Should packaging be part of food cost?
Keep it separate by default so the percentage keeps meaning the same thing over time, but do include it in cost per serving. For delivery-heavy businesses packaging is a large number and hiding it helps nobody. The toggle in the results panel lets you see it both ways.
How do I cost a dish that uses a sauce made in bulk?
Cost the sauce as its own recipe with its own yield to get a cost per litre or per 100 grams, then enter that as the purchase price for the sauce in the dish.
Does the calculator handle imported ingredients priced per pack?
Yes. Choose the pack, can or box unit and it will ask what one contains. That is the only way a per-pack price can be converted into a per-gram cost honestly.
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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.