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Food cost calculator: percentage and menu price
For chefs and owners pricing a menu. Add a dish's ingredients with what you pay and how much goes on the plate, and see its cost per portion, food cost percentage, gross margin, and the price that hits your target. Any currency. It all happens in your browser.
How it works
Cost per portion
pack price ÷ pack size × amount used ÷ usable share, for each ingredient, added up and divided by the portions the recipe makes
Salmon at 24.00 a kilo, 150 g on the plate, 60% usable after trimming: 24.00 ÷ 1000 × 150 ÷ 0.6 = 6.00.
Food cost percentage
cost per portion ÷ menu price × 100
A dish costing 3.00 sold for 10.00 runs at 30%. It's the definition the hospitality literature uses: "cost of food divided by food sales".
Gross margin
menu price − cost per portion
What each dish leaves to pay for staff, rent and profit: 7.00 on that 10.00 dish. Menu engineering calls it the contribution margin, and it's what the bank account sees.
Price for a target
cost per portion ÷ target food cost
The same 3.00 dish at a 25% target: 3.00 ÷ 0.25 = 12.00. Round it to a price that reads well on the menu, then check the margin again.
Why targets disagree
Search "ideal food cost" and every site gives a different range, nearly all of them vendors and none citing a primary source. A steakhouse and a coffee bar can both be healthy at very different numbers. Set the target to yours.
Then rank the menu
A low food cost doesn't make a dish worth keeping on its own: one that earns well per plate but rarely sells may do less for you. The menu engineering calculator weighs margin against sales, and the button above takes these dishes there.
Source: S. M. LeBruto, R. A. Ashley and W. Quain, "Using the contribution margin aspect of menu engineering to enhance financial results", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 9/4 (1997), pp. 161–167: food cost percentage as "cost of food divided by food sales", contribution margin as "selling price minus variable costs".
Volio
Saturday's numbers, Sunday morning
Volio's back office shows takings by day and hour, items and margins (your best sellers), and exports them to Excel or CSV. It's part of Volio, the ordering system for table, till and kitchen.
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What is a good food cost percentage?
There's no published standard. The ranges you'll find online mostly come from vendors and cite no source, and the right number depends on what you sell and what you pay for rent and staff. Your own food cost from last quarter's accounts is a better target than anyone's average.
What does usable % mean?
How much of what you buy ends up on the plate. A whole fish filleted to half its weight is 50% usable, so each gram served costs twice the price per gram paid. Leave it at 100 for things you use whole, like dry pasta or oil.
Does it include staff or energy costs?
No: food cost is the food alone. Labour, energy and rent come out of the gross margin it shows.
How do I share or save a result?
Copy link: the dishes travel in the part of the address after #, which browsers never send to a server, so nothing is stored anywhere. Download CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
Which currency does it use?
Yours. Type any symbol in Currency; the sums are the same in every currency.
See what each dish earns, week by week.
The first 500 venues keep their launch price for 24 months. Launch price ends December 31, 2026.