Food cost percentage is the cost of ingredients in a dish divided by its menu price, multiplied by 100. The formula is simple:
Food Cost % = (Cost of Ingredients ÷ Menu Price) × 100
If a plate costs you $4.50 in ingredients and you sell it for $18, your food cost percentage is (4.50 ÷ 18) × 100 = 25%. Most restaurants aim for 28–35%, but the right number depends on your concept, labor, and overhead.
That's the quick answer. The hard part isn't the formula — it's getting an accurate ingredient cost for a single recipe. Here's how to do it correctly, step by step.
Write out the full recipe with exact quantities. The mistakes that wreck a food cost calculation almost always happen here, because cooks leave out the cheap-but-constant items:
A pinch of saffron or a drizzle of truffle oil can quietly add a dollar to a plate. If it touches the dish, it goes on the list.
Pull your actual invoice prices, not retail or guesses. Note the pack size and unit for each:
You need the price tied to a measurable unit so you can break it down to the amount your recipe actually uses.
This is where most people stumble. Your invoice is in pounds or gallons, but your recipe is in ounces, cups, or grams. Convert everything to the same unit.
Example — chicken breast:
Example — olive oil:
Do this for every ingredient. Keep the long decimals until the final total, then round — rounding too early compounds into real money over hundreds of plates.
Here's the step that separates accurate food costs from fantasy ones. You don't use 100% of what you buy.
When you trim a beef tenderloin, peel an onion, or break down a whole fish, you pay for weight you throw away. The usable portion is your yield percentage.
The yield-adjusted cost formula:
True Cost per Unit = As-Purchased Cost ÷ Yield %
Say you buy beef tenderloin at $16/lb, but after trimming you only get 75% usable meat:
That trimmed steak costs you a third more than the invoice suggests. Ignore yield and your food cost percentage will look great on paper while your margins bleed in real life.
Common yield percentages to watch:
Weigh your own trim a few times to get numbers that match your kitchen instead of relying on charts.
Sum the yield-adjusted cost of every ingredient. Let's build a quick example — a grilled chicken plate:
| Ingredient | Recipe Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken breast (6 oz) | 6 oz | $1.58 |
| Olive oil | 1 oz | $0.22 |
| Roasted potatoes | 5 oz | $0.40 |
| Green beans | 4 oz | $0.55 |
| Butter, garlic, herbs | — | $0.35 |
| Salt, pepper, oil to cook | — | $0.15 |
Total plate cost = $3.25
If you sell that plate for $14:
That's a healthy number for most full-service concepts.
Instead of calculating the percentage after the fact, use your target food cost percentage to set the price:
Menu Price = Recipe Cost ÷ Target Food Cost %
If your target is 30% and the plate costs $3.25:
This guarantees your margin instead of hoping for it. Round up to a clean, psychologically friendly number like $11 or $12.
There's no universal number, but rough benchmarks help:
Remember that food cost isn't profit. After ingredients you still pay labor (often 25–35%), rent, utilities, and everything else. A 30% food cost doesn't mean 70% profit — it usually leaves a single-digit net margin once everything is paid.
When you batch a sauce that yields 40 portions, calculate the total batch cost, then divide by the number of usable portions to get cost per serving. Watch for yield loss during cooking too — reductions and braises lose volume to evaporation, concentrating your cost per finished ounce.
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Doing this by hand for one recipe is straightforward. Doing it for an entire menu — and re-doing it every time onion prices jump or you scale a batch from 20 to 200 covers — is where the spreadsheets fall apart.
That's exactly why we built PrepSheet: it turns any recipe into a costed, scalable prep sheet, handling ingredient costs, yields, portion math, and batch scaling automatically — so you stop guessing your margins. If that sounds like the headache you'd rather skip, [join the waitlist](#) and we'll let you know when it's ready.