Recipe costing calculator
Add your ingredients with their unit price and the quantity a batch uses, set your portion yield and a wastage allowance, and this returns a true cost per portion plus the selling price your target gross profit requires.
Recipe costing calculator
Ingredients
Yield and target
Treat that price as a floor
A cost plus price tells you what a dish must earn, not what it can earn. What it can earn is decided by the prices sitting either side of it on the page. Take this figure to the section and price against the anchors.
The example ingredients are there to show the format. Overwrite them. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
Where recipe costing usually goes wrong.
Purchase weight is not usable weight
A whole turbot, a bone in shoulder, a bunch of leeks and a case of pineapples all lose a meaningful percentage of their weight before anything reaches a plate. Costing against the invoice weight rather than the yielded weight understates plate cost consistently, and it does it worst on the expensive lines where it matters most.
Small ingredients are not free
Oil, butter, stock, seasoning, the herb on top and the sauce underneath. Individually they round to nothing. Across thirty dishes and forty thousand covers a year they are a serious number. Put them in, even as an estimate.
Batch recipes need a real yield
A sauce reduced by a third does not yield the volume that went into the pan. If the portion count in your spec is the theoretical one rather than the observed one, the cost per portion is wrong in your favour, which is the wrong direction to be wrong in.
Prices are a snapshot
A costing done in March against March invoices is a March costing. Refresh the volatile lines monthly: protein, dairy, oils and anything imported.
How to calculate food cost, step by step
Read the guide to food cost control
Costing a plate for one part of the menu? The yield step matters most in main course profitability and starter menu optimisation, and the small items add up fastest in breakfast menu profitability.
Recipe costing calculator FAQs
What is yield loss and why does it change the cost so much?
Yield is how much of what you buy actually reaches the plate. A whole fish at £12 a kilo that breaks down to 45 percent usable fillet costs you £26.67 a kilo on the plate, not £12. Trim, peel, bone and evaporation all come out before portioning, and a costing built on invoice price rather than yielded price understates every protein and most vegetables. It is the single most common reason a theoretical plate cost is wrong.
Should I cost labour into a dish?
Not into the plate cost, because gross profit is defined on food cost alone and mixing labour in makes your GP incomparable with everyone else's. Track prep time separately, and see what a dish costs in labour for how to put a number on it. A dish that takes forty minutes of a chef de partie's day is expensive even at a 72 percent GP, and that cost shows up in your labour line rather than your food line. Both matter; they just are not the same number.
How do I cost a batch recipe down to one portion?
Cost the whole batch at yielded prices, then divide by the number of portions the batch genuinely produces rather than the number it should produce. A sauce that reduces, a terrine that gets trimmed, a dough that leaves offcuts: the real portion count is lower than the theoretical one, and the difference lands in your actual food cost whether or not it is in your spreadsheet.
How often should recipe costings be updated?
Quarterly as a minimum, and immediately when a supplier price moves on a core ingredient. Specifications written at launch and never revisited are the usual reason a kitchen holding its specs still misses its GP: the dish did not change, the invoices did. Protein, dairy and oils move fastest.
Does VAT come into a recipe costing?
Not on the cost side. Most food bought for a kitchen is zero rated, and where you are VAT registered you reclaim input VAT anyway, so plate costs are net. VAT matters on the selling side, where 20 percent has to come off the menu price before gross profit is calculated. The GP calculator handles that end.
What is a realistic plate cost to aim for?
Work backwards rather than forwards. Decide the price your room will pay, take the VAT off, apply your target gross profit, and that is the plate cost the dish has to be built to. Starting from the ingredients and hoping the price lands somewhere acceptable is how dishes end up on menus at a margin nobody checked.