Menu-level costing
Cost your whole menu, not just one dish.
Work through your menu item by item and find out which dishes earn their place.
Costing one dish tells you about one dish. Costing a menu tells you about a business. The pattern almost every operator finds on their first pass is the same: a handful of items are carrying the margin, a handful are quietly eating it, and the ones that look most impressive on the plate are frequently in the second group.
This page is built for working through a menu in one sitting. Start with your highest-selling item, note the cost per serving and the food cost percentage, then clear the rows and move to the next. Keep a list as you go — dish name, cost per serving, selling price, food cost percentage. Ten dishes takes about half an hour and it is usually the most valuable half hour of the month.
The calculator on this page starts empty on purpose. You are not costing our example dish, you are costing yours, and an empty sheet is the right shape for working down a list. Type a dish, note the numbers, clear the rows, type the next one.
Menu engineering, in one paragraph
Once you have cost and popularity for every dish, each one falls into one of four groups. High margin and popular are your stars — protect them and never discount them. High margin and unpopular need better menu placement or a better description. Low margin and popular are your traffic drivers; a small price rise or a small portion change here moves more money than anywhere else on the menu. Low margin and unpopular should be removed.
You do not need software for this. A sheet of paper with four quadrants and your dishes written into them will do, and the numbers from this calculator are what fills it in.
Costing a menu without losing a day to it
Cost your top ten sellers first. They are usually 70 to 80 per cent of your revenue, so they are where an error costs the most and where a correction pays back fastest.
Use one supplier invoice as your source for prices and note the date. Prices move; a costing without a date is a costing you cannot trust in six months.
Do not chase precision on garnishes. Two grams of parsley will not change a decision. Get the protein, the dairy, and anything imported exactly right, and estimate the rest.
Cost the version you actually serve, including the bread on the side and the sauce nobody rings up.
The rollup that matters
Menu-wide food cost is not the average of your dish percentages — it is weighted by how much of each dish you sell. A 45% dish you sell twice a week barely registers. A 38% dish you sell two hundred times a week sets your entire food cost.
weighted food cost % = total ingredient cost of all dishes sold / total revenue from those dishes x 100
That is why the fix is almost never ‘remove the expensive dish’. It is usually a small change to something you sell constantly.
Questions people actually ask
How many dishes should I cost before it is useful?
Your ten best sellers. They typically account for most of your revenue, so the picture they give you is close to the truth about the business.
Should side dishes and sauces be costed separately?
Cost them once as their own recipe, then treat the result as a single ingredient in the dishes that use them. That way a change to the sauce updates in one place rather than fifteen.
My menu food cost looks fine but I am not making money. Why?
Food cost percentage ignores rent, wages, utilities and delivery commissions. A healthy food cost with a 20% delivery commission on top can still leave nothing. Add those in the Advanced panel to see the real cost per serving.
How often should a menu be recosted?
Every quarter, and immediately after any supplier price rise on a main protein or dairy. Those two categories move most and hit the most dishes.
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.