Plate cost and menu price calculator
Enter what the ingredients cost you and how much you lose to trim. The calculator gives you the real cost of what lands on the plate, then the price you need to charge to hit your target food cost.
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.
Why yield changes everything
As-purchased cost is what you pay the supplier. Edible-portion cost is what the usable part actually costs after trim, bone, peel, and shrink. The gap is larger than most kitchens assume.
A whole chicken at $2.20/lb yields roughly 70% usable meat, so that meat costs about $3.14/lb. Beef tenderloin trimmed from a whole psoas can lose a third. Romaine loses 15–20% to core and outer leaves. Every one of those is margin that never appears on a spreadsheet built from invoice prices.
Weigh it once. Record as-purchased weight, weigh the trim, and the percentage is yours permanently for that ingredient and that supplier.
Price forward from the target
The standard approach is backwards: pick a price, then calculate what food cost percentage it implies, then adjust. That's guessing with extra steps.
Price forward instead. Divide true plate cost by your target as a decimal — a $6.00 plate at a 30% target needs to sell at $20.00. Then adjust for what the market will bear and what the item does for the rest of the menu.
What a target should be
There's no universal number, and anyone quoting one is generalising past the point of usefulness. Roughly:
- Quick service and pizza — often 25–30%, with high volume carrying it
- Casual full service — commonly 28–35%
- Fine dining — frequently higher on food, offset by beverage margin and check average
- Beverage — dramatically lower, often 18–24%, which is why the bar subsidises the kitchen
Questions
Should labour go in the ingredient cost?
No. Food cost percentage conventionally covers food only; labour is tracked separately, and the two together are prime cost — the number that actually predicts whether a restaurant survives. Mixing them makes benchmarking impossible.
What waste percentage should I use if I haven't measured?
As a placeholder, 15–20% for most produce, 20–30% for bone-in protein, 5% for dry and packaged goods. But these are placeholders. Your actual yield depends on your supplier's spec and who's holding the knife, and measuring once is worth more than any published table.
Why does the rounded price end in .95?
Because almost every menu does, and it consistently outperforms round numbers. It's a convenience, not a recommendation — round however your menu reads best.