Restaurant costing
Your plate cost is higher than you think.
Most food-cost calculators divide ingredient cost by menu price. That ignores trim loss — which on protein and produce is where the margin quietly goes.
Plate cost and menu price calculator
True cost including trim loss, and the price that hits your target.
As-purchased cost of everything on the plate, before trim loss.
Weigh the trim once per ingredient. Protein and produce are commonly 15–35%.
Full service typically targets 28–35%. Pizza and pasta run lower; steak and seafood higher.
Optional — enter what you charge now to see your real food cost on it.
Every calculator here runs live as you type. Nothing is submitted, stored, or sent anywhere.
The reason most food-cost numbers are wrong is yield. If you buy a whole primal at $6/lb and trim 25% of it away, the usable portion costs $8/lb, not $6. Do that across a menu and a kitchen that thinks it's running 30% food cost is really running closer to 38% — which is roughly the difference between a profitable restaurant and one that closes.
So the first field on the plate cost calculator is waste percentage, and it's the one worth spending time on. Weigh your trim once for each major ingredient and you'll have real numbers instead of estimates.
The second thing these tools do differently: they price forward from a target, not backward from a guess. Operators think in target food cost percentage, so the useful output is the price that achieves it.
Questions
Is anything I enter stored?
No. Every calculation runs in your browser. Nothing is submitted, saved, or sent anywhere.
Why does this give a higher plate cost than my spreadsheet?
Almost certainly yield. If your spreadsheet uses invoice prices without adjusting for trim, bone, and shrink, it understates the cost of every protein and every vegetable on the menu.
What's prime cost?
Food cost plus labour cost as a share of revenue. It's the number that predicts survival better than either component alone, and the commonly cited target is around 60% or below for full service.