The head tool
Free food cost calculator
Free · no signupFor restaurants, cafés, food trucks, caterers and home bakers: anyone who decides what a dish sells for.
You cook for money and you set the prices. This calculator starts from the pack you bought: a 50 lb sack, a 5 lb block, a whole bird. It works forward to the cost of one portion, your food cost percentage, and the price that hits your target margin.
Free, no signup, nothing stored. It is filled in with a worked example: change any number and everything updates.
What it costs
The price at 28% is arithmetic, not a recommendation: the price at which this plate’s cost equals that percentage. What you charge depends on your market, your portions and your overheads.
This calculator keeps nothing. Reload the page and it is gone. Pro, saved recipes, and repricing every dish when a supplier price changes, is built and goes on sale soon.
What you bought, and what the recipe uses
Enter the pack you actually purchased. Yield is the percentage left after trimming, peeling or cooking, leave it at 100 if nothing is lost. Weight converts to weight and volume to volume; cups-to-grams needs an ingredient’s density, which this calculator will not guess, pick matching kinds of units for a pack and its use.
At 65% yield you buy 615 g to end up with 400 g, and you pay for all of it.
The three things that make costing wrong
1. Pack sizes
You do not buy flour by the gram. You buy a 50 lb sack for $27.40 and use 640 g of it. Getting from one to the other is the arithmetic most calculators skip, and it is why so many costing spreadsheets carry a per-unit price that was typed in once, by hand, from a guess.
2. Yield
A whole chicken is not chicken meat. Trimmed weight is not purchased weight. If you need 400 g of meat from a bird that yields 65%, you are buying 615 g and paying for every gram, including the 215 g you throw away or turn into stock. Cost the plate without that and you will be short on every single serving.
3. Sub-recipes
The sauce that goes into six dishes should be costed once, as a batch, and then charged to each dish in proportion to how much it uses. Costing it inline in all six is how the numbers drift apart, and how a supplier price change stops being reflected anywhere. Sub-recipes are part of Pro.
The formula, if you want it
cost per unit = pack price / pack size (converted to a base unit) line cost = (quantity / yield%) x cost per unit batch cost = sum of every line cost per plate = batch cost / portions food cost % = cost per plate / menu price x 100 target price = cost per plate / target food cost %
Common questions
- How do you calculate food cost?
- Divide what a dish costs you to make by what you sell it for, then multiply by 100. A plate that costs $1.83 and sells for $7.50 runs at 24.4% food cost. The hard part is getting an honest number for what the plate costs, which means starting from the pack you actually bought rather than a per-gram price you guessed at.
- What is a good food cost percentage?
- Full-service restaurants commonly target somewhere in the high twenties to low thirties, with bars and beverage-led venues running lower and steakhouses or seafood higher. There is no universal right answer: a 40% food cost on a high-volume, low-labour dish can be better business than 22% on something that takes a chef twenty minutes. The full breakdown by venue type is in our guide, linked below the calculator.
- Why does yield change the cost?
- Because you pay for what you buy, not what ends up on the plate. If a whole chicken yields 65% usable meat and your recipe needs 400 g, you have to buy about 615 g and pay for the other 215 g too. Ignoring yield understates your costs, always in the direction that loses you money.
- Why will it not convert cups to grams?
- Because that conversion depends on what is in the cup. A cup of flour is about 120 g, a cup of water about 236 g, a cup of honey about 340 g. Guessing at a single factor would produce plate costs that are wrong by two or three times while looking perfectly reasonable, and you would have no way to spot it. So weight converts to weight, volume to volume, and the calculator asks you to pick matching units instead.
- Is the calculator free?
- Yes, and it always will be. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored. LineCost Pro, saved recipes, an ingredient price book that reprices every dish when a supplier price changes, sub-recipes, and printable cost cards, is built and goes on sale soon.