A free recipe costing template for UK kitchens is simply a spreadsheet that lists each ingredient, its purchase cost, the quantity used in a recipe, and calculates the total dish cost, cost per portion, and gross profit (GP) margin. You can build one in Excel or Google Sheets in about 15 minutes — below is exactly what to include, the formulas to use, and the UK-specific details (like VAT and GP targets) that most generic templates get wrong.
Create a sheet with these columns:
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Ingredient | e.g. Diced beef |
| Pack size | The unit you buy (e.g. 5 kg) |
| Pack price | What you pay your supplier (e.g. £42.50) |
| Unit cost | Pack price ÷ pack size (£8.50/kg) |
| Recipe quantity | Amount used in the dish (0.18 kg) |
| Line cost | Unit cost × recipe quantity (£1.53) |
Then add summary rows beneath:
That's the whole engine. Everything else is refinement.
In Google Sheets or Excel, three formulas cover nearly everything:
Unit cost:
```
= Pack price / Pack size
```
This converts a supplier pack into a cost per gram, millilitre, or each — so a 2.5 kg bag of flour at £1.80 becomes £0.00072 per gram.
Line cost:
```
= Unit cost * Recipe quantity
```
Gross profit percentage:
```
= (Selling price ex VAT - Cost per portion) / Selling price ex VAT
```
Format that last cell as a percentage. Most UK food businesses aim for a gross profit of 65–70% on food, meaning your ingredient cost should be roughly 30–35% of the ex-VAT selling price. Drinks and high-margin items often run higher.
This is where free templates downloaded from non-UK sites trip people up. In the UK, standard-rate VAT is 20%, and most hot or eat-in food sold by restaurants and cafés is standard-rated.
Your GP must always be calculated on the ex-VAT (net) selling price, not the price on the menu. If you sell a dish for £12.00 including VAT, the net price is:
```
= 12.00 / 1.2 = £10.00
```
Calculate your gross profit against that £10.00. Using the gross menu price inflates your apparent margin and quietly erodes profit. Build a dedicated "Selling price (ex VAT)" cell into your template so you never mix the two up.
Note that VAT on food is genuinely complicated — cold takeaway food can be zero-rated, while the same item eaten in is standard-rated. If in doubt, check HMRC VAT Notice 709/1 or ask your accountant.
Raw purchase weight is rarely the same as usable weight. A whole salmon, a head of broccoli, or a bag of onions all lose weight to trimming, peeling, and cooking. This is your yield.
Add a yield percentage column. If you buy 1 kg of carrots at £0.90 but only 85% is usable after peeling, your true usable cost is:
```
= 0.90 / 0.85 = £1.06 per usable kg
```
Skipping this step is the single biggest reason real food costs come in higher than the spreadsheet promised. For protein especially, the gap between purchase weight and plate weight can swing your GP by several points.
| Ingredient | Pack | Pack price | Unit cost | Qty used | Line cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beef mince | 5 kg | £32.50 | £6.50/kg | 1.5 kg | £9.75 |
| Onions | 10 kg | £8.00 | £0.80/kg | 0.6 kg | £0.48 |
| Chopped tomatoes | 2.5 kg | £2.40 | £0.96/kg | 1.6 kg | £1.54 |
| Kidney beans | 2.6 kg | £2.80 | £1.08/kg | 1.2 kg | £1.29 |
| Spices & oil | — | — | — | — | £1.20 |
A healthy margin — but only because we costed it properly.
The point of a digital template over pen and paper is batch scaling. Add a "scaling factor" cell at the top. If your recipe serves 10 and you need 35, the factor is 3.5. Multiply every recipe quantity by that cell:
```
= Base quantity * Scaling_factor
```
Now you have an instant shopping list for any cover count, and your cost per portion stays accurate as quantities change.
A costing template is only as good as the prices in it. Supplier prices move constantly — beef, dairy, and oil have all swung sharply in recent years. Build the habit of:
That last point matters most: if "beef mince" appears in twelve recipes, you want to change its price once, not twelve times.
A free template is perfect for a handful of recipes. But the cracks show fast: you end up maintaining the same ingredient price across dozens of tabs, manually re-checking yields, and rebuilding scaling math every service. One supplier price change means hunting through every sheet by hand. The admin quietly eats the time you were trying to save.
That's the gap PrepSheet is built to close. It turns any recipe into a costed, scalable prep sheet automatically — pulling live ingredient costs, handling yields and portion math, and batch-scaling in one click, so you stop guessing margins and waste. If you've outgrown the spreadsheet and want costing that keeps itself up to date, join the PrepSheet waitlist — we'd love to have you try it.