Food Cost Calculator

What food cost percentage actually tells you

Food cost percentage is the share of a sale that went into the ingredients. Sell a burger for $14.50 with $3.40 of ingredients in it and the food cost of that dish is about 23%. The remaining 77% is not profit. It is what you have left to pay the kitchen, the rent, the power and everything else out of.

It is the first number worth watching because it is the only large cost you can change this week. You can change a portion weight, change a supplier, change a menu price or pull a dish. You cannot change the rent this week.

The formula, and the part most people get wrong

For a period: (opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory) divided by food revenue, times one hundred.

That bracket is consumption, not purchases, and the difference is the entire reason inventory counts exist. If you bought $240,000 of food in January while your stockroom fell from $85,000 to $78,000, you actually consumed $247,000. Anyone costing from invoices alone gets a falsely high number in the month they stock up and a falsely low one the month after, and concludes the kitchen is inconsistent when the only thing moving is the delivery schedule.

On $820,000 of food revenue that is a 30.1% food cost, which is where a full service restaurant should be.

Costing one plate, line by line

A cheeseburger with fries. Beef patty 150 g at $8.90/kg is $1.34. Brioche bun, one at $0.65. Cheddar 30 g at $11.50/kg is $0.35. Bacon 25 g at $12.80/kg is $0.32. Lettuce, tomato and onion 60 g at $3.20/kg is $0.19. House sauce 30 g at $6.40/kg is $0.19. Fries 200 g at $1.85/kg is $0.37.

That is $3.40 a plate. At $14.50 on the menu the dish runs a 23.5% food cost with a margin of $11.10.

The patty is 39% of the plate cost. That is the line where a supplier conversation is worth having. You could get the sauce free and it would move the plate by nineteen cents, which is the kind of saving that costs more in meeting time than it returns.

Benchmarks by venue type

There is no single correct figure. The band depends on what you run.

• Full service restaurant: 28 to 32%
• Bistro and fast casual: 20 to 25%
• Cafe: 18 to 24%
• Bar: 15 to 22%
• Fine dining: 30 to 38%, because expensive ingredients are carried by a higher check and fewer covers

Three mistakes that cost real money

Costing from invoices instead of consumption. Without an opening and a closing count you are measuring cash out of the door, not food onto plates.

Costing from gross weight. A recipe written from the weight you buy rather than the weight that reaches the plate is systematically optimistic, and on meat, fish and anything that gets trimmed the gap is easily a tenth of the plate cost.

Costing once at opening and never again. Ingredient prices move continuously. When beef goes up 15%, the burger above gains twenty cents a plate, and across two hundred covers a month that is $40 you never decided to spend.

What to do when the number jumps

Check that the number is true before you act on it. Does the inventory cover the same dates as the purchases? Is the revenue figure food only? Did beverage consumption end up in the food line? Most sudden five point swings are data problems, not kitchen problems.

Once you trust it, work the biggest share of the biggest sellers. One point on a dish that sells two hundred times a month beats ten points on something that sells five times, and it is the same afternoon of work either way.