The short answer: work out the true cost of every ingredient in each dish, add your packaging, labour and a share of your overheads, then set a price that leaves you a gross profit margin of at least 65–70% on food. Anything less and a busy Friday night can still lose you money. Here's how to do it properly, step by step, with UK-specific numbers.
Most takeaway owners underprice because they cost "the chicken and the rice" and forget the oil, the marinade, the garnish, the sauce pot and the salt. Those extras routinely add 8–15% to a dish's real cost.
For each dish, list:
This gives you your plate cost (food cost per dish). Be honest here — a "roughly £2" that's actually £2.60 will quietly destroy your margin across a whole menu.
Takeaway packaging in the UK typically costs 30p–£1.20 per order depending on your containers, bags, cutlery, napkins and sauce pots. If you use branded or compostable packaging, it's at the higher end.
Add the full packaging cost to your plate cost. A curry with a £2.40 food cost and 85p of packaging really costs £3.25 before anything else.
The standard UK takeaway target is a food cost of 28–33% of the selling price (excluding VAT considerations — more on that below). That means:
Selling price = (plate cost + packaging) ÷ target food cost %
Example: your chicken tikka masala costs £3.25 all-in.
If your local market won't bear £11 for a curry, that's a signal the dish needs re-engineering (cheaper cut, smaller protein portion, more sauce bulk) — not that you should sell it at a loss and hope volume saves you. It won't.
If you sell through Just Eat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats, commissions of 14–35% change everything. A dish priced at £10.95 in-store may need to be £13.50–£14.50 on the apps to make the same margin.
Two common approaches:
1. Separate platform pricing — higher prices on the apps (customers generally accept this).
2. Blended pricing — one price everywhere, accepting thinner app margins but pushing direct orders through your own phone line or website with a small discount.
Either way, run the numbers per channel. A dish that's profitable over the counter can be a loss-maker on a 30% commission platform once you add packaging.
Once your rolling 12-month turnover passes the £90,000 VAT threshold, you must register and charge 20% VAT on hot takeaway food. Two things catch people out:
Food cost percentage tells you about gross profit, but profit is what's left after rent, gas, electric, wages, insurance and card fees. A quick sanity check:
If your food cost is right but you're still not making money, the problem is portion sizes drifting, waste, or undercharging for delivery — not the menu price itself.
Once every dish is costed, sort them into four groups:
Meal deals and bundles deserve their own costing: a "curry + rice + naan for £14.95" deal only works if you've costed all three components together, not assumed the add-ons are cheap.
UK ingredient prices have moved sharply in recent years — cooking oil, chicken, cheese and energy have all seen double-digit swings. A menu costed in January can be underwater by June. Recost your top 10 sellers every quarter, and your full menu at least twice a year. When a supplier price rises, update the dish cost the same week, not "when you get round to it."
Doner kebab, large:
Do this for every line on your menu and you'll know — not hope — that each order makes you money.
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If costing a full menu by hand sounds tedious, that's because it is — which is exactly why most people skip it and lose money. Our free food cost calculator does the plate-cost and selling-price maths for any dish in a couple of minutes, and if you want the whole menu costed properly, the ready-made Excel costing templates in our shop handle waste, yields, packaging and batch scaling automatically. Price it once, price it right.