Costing tools
Three calculators that do the arithmetic properly, including the two things most spreadsheets get wrong: stripping VAT out of the selling price before calculating gross profit, and loading yield loss into the plate cost. Free to use, nothing to sign up for.
The calculators
Food cost calculator
Enter a plate cost, a menu price and your sales figures. Returns food cost percentage, gross profit, cash margin per plate and the menu engineering classification: star, plowhorse, puzzle or dog.
Open calculator 02Recipe costing calculator
Build a plate cost from the ingredients upwards. Handles batch recipes, portion yield and a wastage allowance, then suggests a selling price against your target gross profit.
Open calculator 03GP calculator
The quick one. Cost in, price in, gross profit out, with a VAT toggle and a reverse calculation for the menu price a target GP actually requires.
Open calculatorTwo errors that make most costing spreadsheets useless.
Calculating gross profit on the gross price
If you are VAT registered, the money you keep from a £26.00 main is £21.67. Running your GP calculation against £26.00 rather than £21.67 will overstate your margin by several points across the whole menu, which is enough to turn a real problem into an apparent success. Every calculator here handles this with an explicit VAT toggle.
Costing on purchase weight rather than usable weight
A turbot at £22 per kilo is not £22 per usable kilo once it has been trimmed. The same applies to any whole vegetable, any bone in cut and anything you reduce. The recipe costing calculator includes a wastage and yield allowance so plate costs reflect what actually reaches the plate.
The tool scores one dish. An audit scores the menu.
Costing a dish tells you whether that dish works. Costing all of them, weighted by what actually sells, tells you whether the business works. That is what a menu audit does.
Working on one part of the menu? See menu profitability by section.