Food cost calculator
Enter what the plate costs you and what you charge for it, and this returns food cost percentage, gross profit and cash margin. Add your sales figures and it also places the dish on the menu engineering matrix, with the action that follows from where it lands.
Food cost calculator
The dish
Sales context
Fill in the sales fields for a classification
The quadrant needs both axes: cash margin per dish and share of sales.
Reposition, rename, rewrite the description, brief the floor. Fix the demand, leave the recipe alone.
Lock the spec, secure the supply, test a modest price rise. Never discount it.
Remove it, or rebuild it into something with a genuine reason to be on the page.
Keep the demand, attack the plate cost. Portion spec, supply price, and margin attached alongside.
Take these figures with you
A one page summary of this dish, branded, with the classification and the action that follows from it. Nothing to fill in and no email needed.
Choose Save as PDF as the destination in the print dialogue.
Or have me look at it
If you want this dish written up properly, with the two changes I would make to it, send the figures over and they come back to you. No list, no sequence, no follow up unless you ask for one.
Your figures are only transmitted if you submit this form. See the privacy notice.
The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored or transmitted unless you choose to email the figures to yourself above.
The arithmetic behind the boxes.
Food cost percentage is the plate cost divided by the net selling price. Gross profit is the inverse of it. Cash margin is the pounds left behind after the plate cost, and it is the number that decides whether a dish is worth its place.
The classification uses two thresholds. A dish is high margin if its cash margin is at or above the average across the section. It is high popularity if its share of sales is at or above 70 percent of an equal split, which is the long standing industry convention. On a ten dish section, an equal split is 10 percent, so the threshold is 7 percent.
Two cautions. Run the analysis by section rather than across the whole menu, because comparing a £7 starter against a £34 main on cash margin tells you nothing useful. And use at least eight weeks of sales data, since a shorter window will misclassify anything seasonal.
How to calculate food cost, step by step
Read the full method
The other two calculators.
Food cost calculator FAQs
What do star, plowhorse, puzzle and dog actually mean?
They are the four quadrants of the menu engineering matrix, set by two axes: cash margin per plate against the menu average, and share of sales against what an equal split would give. A star is high on both and should be protected. A plowhorse sells well but earns little, so re-engineer the plate cost rather than delist it. A puzzle earns well but nobody orders it, which is a positioning and description problem. A dog is low on both and usually comes off.
Why does this use cash margin rather than GP percentage?
Because percentage measures efficiency and your bank account takes pounds. A £7 starter at 78 percent GP returns £4.55; a £32 main at 62 percent returns £16.53. Classifying on percentage would favour the first and squeeze the second, which is exactly the wrong instruction. The GP calculator covers the percentage side. Pricing a menu covers the other side of that, and the labour a dish takes is the cost neither number includes.
How much sales data do I need for this to mean anything?
Eight weeks minimum, twelve preferred, and ideally a period without a bank holiday or a one off event distorting the mix. Shorter than that and you are classifying noise. If a dish has only been on the menu a fortnight, it has not had time to find its share of sales and the matrix will call it a dog unfairly.
Why is the popularity threshold 70 percent of an equal split?
Because a straight equal split is an unreasonable bar. On a ten dish menu an equal split is 10 percent each, but real menus never distribute evenly, and holding every dish to 10 percent would classify most of a healthy menu as underperforming. Seventy percent of fair share, so 7 percent on that menu, is the standard menu engineering threshold and is the point below which a dish genuinely is not pulling its weight.
Can a dish be a star with a below average GP percentage?
Yes, and it is more common than people expect. An expensive protein can run 62 percent GP and still return more cash per plate than anything else on the section while selling in volume. That is a star. The panel above says so explicitly when it happens, because a weak looking percentage next to a strong verdict is the point at which people usually make the wrong call.
Does this store or send my figures anywhere?
No. The whole calculation runs in your browser and nothing is transmitted. The PDF is generated by your own browser from what is on screen. Figures only leave your machine if you choose to send them.
Once you have scored a dish, see how the same sums apply in main course profitability, starter menu optimisation and dessert menu profitability.
One dish takes two minutes. Thirty dishes takes forty hours.
A menu audit does this across your whole menu, weighted by what actually sells, and comes back with a ranked list of changes rather than a spreadsheet.