A kitchen prep sheet is a daily checklist that tells your team exactly what to prepare, how much, and in what order before service begins. To write one, list each prep item, set par levels (target quantities), note current stock, calculate the amount to prep, and assign it to a station or person. Done right, it eliminates guesswork, cuts waste, and keeps service running smoothly even when your best cook calls in sick.
Here's exactly how to build one that works.
A prep sheet is not a recipe and it's not an inventory count. It sits between them. It translates "we expect a busy Friday" into "make 4 liters of demi-glace, portion 60 chicken breasts, and dice 3 kilos of onions."
A good prep sheet answers four questions for every item:
When those four things are clear, anyone on your team can walk in and start working without asking you 20 questions.
Build your sheet as a table. At minimum, include these columns:
| Column | What it tracks |
|--------|----------------|
| Item | The prepped component (e.g. "marinara sauce") |
| Par level | Target quantity to have on hand |
| On hand | What's left from yesterday |
| To prep | Par minus on hand |
| Unit | Liters, portions, kilos, each |
| Station | Grill, sauté, pantry, pastry |
| Assigned to | The cook responsible |
| Done | Checkbox |
The magic column is To prep. It's simply your par level minus what you already have. If your par for marinara is 8 liters and you have 3 left, your cook makes 5. This single calculation prevents both running out mid-service and over-producing food that spoils.
Start by walking your menu and listing every component that gets made ahead of service. Group them by station so each cook sees only their own work.
For a typical kitchen this might look like:
Don't skip the "invisible" items like garnishes, sauces, and side components. Those are exactly the things that get forgotten and stall a ticket.
Par levels are the heart of the system. A par level is the amount you want ready at the start of service so you don't run out, plus a small buffer.
To set yours:
1. Look at sales history for the same day of the week.
2. Note how many portions of each dish you typically sell.
3. Add a buffer of roughly 10–20% for busy nights.
4. Adjust for holidays, events, weather, and reservations on the books.
For example, if you sell about 50 portions of salmon on a Saturday and each portion uses one fillet, your par might be 60 fillets. Write that down. Pars aren't permanent — review them monthly and tighten them as you learn your patterns.
List items in the order they should be made, not alphabetically. Long-lead items go first: stocks, braises, doughs that need to rest, anything that takes hours. Quick items like chopping herbs go last so they stay fresh.
A smart sequence keeps cooks from standing around waiting and stops perishable garnishes from wilting on the bench for six hours.
This is where most prep sheets stop — and where the best ones keep going. If you add the cost of each prepped item, your prep sheet becomes a daily food-cost check.
For each item, calculate:
If your marinara costs $4 to make 5 liters and yields 25 portions, that's $0.16 per portion. Layer that into a dish that sells for $14 and you can instantly see whether the plate hits your target food cost (usually 28–35%).
Doing this by hand on a calculator is slow and error-prone, which is why most kitchens skip it. But when you track cost per portion on the same sheet you use to prep, you catch creeping costs before they wreck your margins.
Demand changes. A prep sheet built only for "normal" Tuesdays falls apart when a 40-person party books in.
Design your sheet so you can scale a recipe up or down quickly. If you know one batch of soup serves 20 and you suddenly need 80, you need to multiply every ingredient by four — without re-doing the math for each line. Batch scaling lets you adjust the whole sheet to expected covers in seconds instead of recalculating by hand.
A prep sheet on someone's phone is useless. Print it, clip it to each station, and let cooks physically check off items as they finish. The act of checking a box creates accountability and gives you a one-glance read on where prep stands at any moment.
At the end of service, the marked-up sheet also tells you what got used and what's left — feeding straight into tomorrow's "on hand" numbers.
```
PREP SHEET — [Date] — [Day]
Expected covers: ___
STATION: SAUTÉ
Item Par On hand To prep Unit By Done
Marinara 8 3 5 L Sam [ ]
Demi-glace 4 1 3 L Sam [ ]
Blanched beans 60 20 40 port Lee [ ]
```
Repeat the block for each station. Keep it to one page per station so nothing gets lost.
Writing the structure is straightforward — the slow, painful part is the math: ingredient costs, cost per portion, food cost %, and rescaling every batch when covers change.
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If you're tired of doing the calculator math by hand, try PrepSheet free and join the waitlist to help shape what we build next.