Food cost calculator
Start from the pack you actually bought — a 50 lb sack, a 5 lb block, a whole bird — and get the cost of one portion, your food cost percentage, and the price that hits the margin you are aiming at.
Free, no signup, nothing stored. It is filled in with a worked example — change any number and everything updates.
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.
At 65% yield you have to buy 615 g to end up with 400 g — and you pay for all of it.
What it costs
- Batch cost
- $7.75
- Cost per portion
- $1.94
- Food cost
- 25.8%
- Price at 28%
- $6.92
“Price at 28%” is arithmetic, not a recommendation: it is the price at which this plate’s cost equals that percentage. What you should actually charge depends on your market, your portion sizes 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.
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 quietly 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 quietly 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 not the division — it 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. Use the target as a dial, not a rule.
- 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.