Recipe & Plate Costing Calculator
Add each ingredient's cost and quantity used in the dish to build up an exact plate cost.
How to cost a recipe accurately
Plate cost is the foundation every other number in your restaurant sits on. Menu prices, food cost targets, and profitability forecasts are all built from it, so an error here propagates into every decision you make afterwards. Costing a recipe properly is not difficult, but it does require accounting for a few things that most operators skip.
Step 1: Write down the real recipe
Cost the dish as your kitchen actually produces it, not as it was written when the menu launched. Portions drift, garnishes get added, and a sauce that was meant to be 30ml becomes 50ml because that is what the ladle holds. If the specification on paper does not match what leaves the pass, you are costing a dish you do not sell.
Step 2: Convert purchase units to recipe units
You buy in cases, kilos, and gallons but cook in grams and millilitres. Every ingredient needs converting to a cost per recipe unit before it can be totalled.
If flour costs $18 for a 10kg sack, the cost per gram is $18 ÷ 10,000 = $0.0018. A recipe using 250g costs $0.45. Do this for every line, including the ones that feel too small to matter — they add up to real money across a full menu.
Step 3: Adjust for yield — the step most operators skip
This is where most recipe costing goes wrong. You do not use the whole of what you buy. Trim, peel, bone, and cooking loss all mean your usable quantity is less than your purchased quantity, and your true cost per usable unit is correspondingly higher.
Buy a 1kg beef striploin at $28. After trimming fat and silverskin you have 800g of usable meat, a 80% yield. Your real cost is $28 ÷ 0.80 = $35 per usable kilo, not $28. A 200g portion costs $7.00, not $5.60 — a 25% understatement on the most expensive component of the dish.
| Ingredient | Typical Yield |
|---|---|
| Whole beef striploin (trimmed) | 75–85% |
| Whole chicken (portioned) | 65–75% |
| Whole round fish (filleted) | 40–50% |
| Onions, carrots (peeled) | 80–90% |
| Leafy greens (picked, washed) | 60–75% |
| Dry goods, oils | 100% |
Measure your own yields rather than trusting a table. They vary with supplier quality, specification, and the skill of whoever is doing the butchery. Run the test three times and average it.
Step 4: Include everything that reaches the plate
The invisible costs are the ones that quietly destroy margin because they never appear on a recipe card:
- Cooking oil, butter, and fats used in preparation
- Salt, pepper, herbs, and spices
- Garnishes — the herb sprig, the lemon wedge, the dusting of parmesan
- Sauces and dressings, costed as their own sub-recipes
- Bread service, butter, and complimentary items
- Packaging and disposables for takeaway and delivery orders
Individually these look trivial. Across a menu they routinely account for two to four percentage points of food cost — often the entire difference between the food cost you budgeted and the one you actually report.
Step 5: Cost sub-recipes separately
Stocks, sauces, doughs, and dressings should each be costed once as a batch, then divided into a cost per portion used. Make the stock recipe yield 5 litres at a total cost of $12.50, and your cost is $2.50 per litre or $0.075 for a 30ml serving. Cost the batch once and reuse the figure everywhere the sub-recipe appears.
Worked example: pan-roasted chicken
| Component | Quantity | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken supreme (70% yield applied) | 220g | $3.40 |
| Potatoes (85% yield applied) | 180g | $0.55 |
| Seasonal vegetables | 120g | $0.80 |
| Jus (sub-recipe) | 40ml | $0.35 |
| Butter, oil, seasoning, garnish | — | $0.20 |
| Total plate cost | $5.30 |
With a plate cost of $5.30 established, the menu price calculator turns it into a defensible selling price.
Theoretical versus actual food cost
Once every dish is costed, multiply each plate cost by units sold to get your theoretical food cost — what your food cost should have been if every plate matched spec. Compare that against the actual food cost percentage your inventory reports.
The gap between the two is your waste, over-portioning, spoilage, and loss, expressed as a number. Well-run kitchens keep it under two percentage points. A gap of five points or more means something systematic is happening, and no amount of re-pricing will fix it — you have an operational problem, not a pricing problem.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I re-cost recipes?
Quarterly for the full menu, and immediately for any dish whose key ingredient moves more than about 10%. Proteins, dairy, and produce move fastest; dry goods can usually wait for the quarterly review.
Do I need to cost every item on the menu?
Start with your top 20 sellers by volume and your highest-cost dishes. Together they usually account for the large majority of your food spend, and costing them properly delivers most of the benefit for a fraction of the effort.
Should packaging be included for delivery orders?
Yes. Containers, bags, cutlery, and labels are a genuine cost of fulfilling that order and can add $0.50–$1.50 per delivery ticket. Combined with platform commission, an unmodified dine-in price often makes delivery orders unprofitable.
What is the difference between plate cost and food cost percentage?
Plate cost is the forward-looking ingredient cost of one dish, and it sets prices. Food cost percentage is a backward-looking aggregate across the whole menu for a period, and it checks whether reality matched the plan. You need both.
How do I handle ingredients with volatile prices?
Cost using a rolling average of recent purchase prices rather than the most recent invoice, and add a small buffer for genuinely volatile items such as seafood. Re-check them monthly rather than quarterly.