Cost a recipe from real purchase prices, reconciling purchase units against recipe units and adjusting for yield loss, then price it against your own target.
Change the inputs that matter to your decision. Optional assumptions stay collapsed until you need them.
Optional. Without these the result is contribution, not profit.
$0.788 a portion against a $2.63 price is a 30% food cost.
On your 30% target.
| Flour | $0.75300 g at $2.50 per 1 kg |
|---|---|
| Butter | $2.40200 g at $6.00 per 500 g |
| Total recipe cost | $3.15Across 2 ingredients |
| Cost per portion | $0.788 |
| Price for a 30% food cost | $2.63 |
| Contribution per portion | $1.84Price less food cost — this is not profit until labour and overhead come out |
Purchase units and recipe units are reconciled rather than multiplied together, and yield loss raises the cost of the usable portion above the shelf price. Price less food cost is contribution, not profit — add labour and overhead to see what a portion actually earns.
Practical notes about the inputs, assumptions, and result.
Because they are almost never the same. You buy flour by the kilogram and use it by the gram; you buy oil by the litre and use it by the tablespoon. Multiplying a recipe quantity by a purchase price without reconciling the two is the most common error in recipe costing, and it produces figures that are wrong by a factor of a thousand — 300 g of flour bought at $2.50 a kilogram costed as $750.
The share of what you buy that ends up in the dish. Onions lose their skin and ends, a whole chicken loses bone and trim, lettuce loses its outer leaves. If you need 800 g of peeled onion at 80% yield, you have to buy a kilogram — so the true cost of the usable portion is 25% above the shelf price. Professional costing has always worked this way and ignoring it understates every dish with trim.
It depends entirely on your format. Full-service restaurants generally run 28–35%, pizza 20–25%, fine dining can exceed 35% because labour is the bigger cost, and bars run lower still. There is no single right number, which is why the result is measured against the target you enter rather than a fixed band.
No, and conflating them is how a dish that looks profitable loses money. Price minus food cost is contribution: what the dish contributes toward everything else. Labour, rent, utilities, packaging, and card fees all come out of that. Add a labour and overhead figure per portion and the result shows an operating profit instead.
The tool asks for the density that bridges them, and until you give it that ingredient is marked unresolved and left out of the total. Two tablespoons of oil against a price per kilogram is not costable without knowing that oil is about 0.92 g per millilitre. Printing a number anyway would be worse than saying what is missing.
No. Food cost percentage is conventionally measured against the net price, so enter what you keep rather than what the customer pays. Including tax understates your food cost percentage and makes a dish look more profitable than it is.
Other tools in cooking & kitchen.
Scale a recipe by servings, by a factor, or by pan size, with practical fractions, part eggs given as a weight, and the ingredients that do not scale linearly handled as such.
Convert kitchen volume, weight, and oven temperature, and turn a cup measure into a weight using the ingredient's own density and the way the cup was filled.
Work a formula in baker's percentages against the total of every flour in the dough, with hydration, salt, and dough weight derived and any preferment split into its flour and water.