06/11/2026·5 min read

Food cost for beginners: three simple steps, a calculator and no accountant

You do not need an accountant to know your food cost. You need your recipes, your supplier invoices, a stock count and a calculator. The method has three steps. First, work out what each dish really costs. Second, set a price from a target percentage. Third, check the real figure against your stock and sales. Each step needs only a simple formula or two.

Step 1: Cost each dish on what you can actually use

Most beginners cost a dish using the price on the invoice. That price is for the product as you bought it, before trimming, peeling, boning or cooking loss. You can only sell the part that is left. The Culinary Institute of America's kitchen-math handout gives two formulas for this:

Yield % = usable (edible portion) quantity ÷ as-purchased quantity × 100
Usable cost = as-purchased cost ÷ yield % (written as a decimal)

Here is a published example. You buy 20 lb of beef for $80 and get 16 usable lb after trimming. That is an 80% yield. The invoice says $4.00 per lb, but each pound you actually serve costs $5.00.

Do a yield test once for each ingredient you trim or prep. Weigh it before prep, weigh it after, and write down the result. Then, for every recipe card, multiply the quantity of each ingredient by its usable cost and add the lines together. The total is your portion cost.

Step 2: Set the price from a target percentage

A dish's food cost percentage is its portion cost ÷ menu price × 100. To find the price that hits the percentage you want, turn the formula around and divide the portion cost by your target. Wisk gives this example: a $4.43 portion at a 30% target is $4.43 ÷ 0.30 = $14.77.

Choosing a target is the harder part. The National Restaurant Association's data for 2024 shows food and non-alcohol beverage costs at a median of 32.0% of sales for full-service respondents and 32.4% for limited-service. Full-service operators with sales of $2 million or more had a median of 31.0%, and those below $2 million had 33.7%. The NRA says plainly that these figures are not standards or goals for individual restaurants. They are a tool for comparing your own performance.

Commonly cited industry guidance puts food cost at 28% to 35%. Treat any target as a starting point and adjust it to your own costs and margins.

Step 3: Count stock and find your real number

Steps 1 and 2 tell you what your food cost should be. This step tells you what it actually was. The formula is:

Actual food cost % = (opening stock + purchases − closing stock) ÷ food sales

US Foods works through this example. Opening stock of 16,000, plus 4,000 in purchases, minus closing stock of 17,000, gives 3,000 of food used. Divide that by 10,000 in food sales and you get 30%.

Count the same items in the same units at the same time of day each time, and value them at current invoice prices. Zoomshift suggests looking at your last three months, not a single month. One big delivery, a slow week or a counting error can make a single month look much better or worse than it was.

When the number comes out too high

The stock formula counts everything that left your shelves, not only what you sold. That includes overproduction, spoilage, trim and plate waste. So a high percentage is not always a pricing problem.

Compare your actual figure with what your recipe costs predicted for the dishes you sold. If the actual figure is much higher, check three things before you raise prices: waste, portion sizes, and whether deliveries and counts are being recorded correctly.

Commonly cited guidance says that staying above 35% points to problems with pricing, waste, portion control or inventory tracking. Use that as a prompt to investigate, not as a fixed rule.

Worked example

These numbers are illustrative. Say you buy 10 kg of chicken thighs for 60 euros and get 8 kg after trimming. Your yield is 80%, so the usable cost is 7.50 euros per kg, not the 6.00 on the invoice. Your dish uses 200 g of chicken (1.50 euros) and 1.10 euros of other ingredients. The portion cost is 2.60 euros.

At a 30% target: 2.60 ÷ 0.30 = 8.67 euros. Round it to 8.90, which gives a food cost of about 29%.
If you had used the invoice price, the chicken would look like 1.20 euros and the portion like 2.30 euros, giving a price of 7.70 euros. At that price, the real food cost is 2.60 ÷ 7.70, or about 34%.

The gap between 29% and 34% comes entirely from ignoring trim, and it applies to every portion you sell.

Your checklist

Do a yield test for every ingredient you trim, peel or bone.
Write a recipe card with exact quantities for every dish.
Calculate portion cost using usable cost, not invoice price.
Divide each portion cost by your target percentage to check your prices.
Count stock at regular intervals, the same way each time.
Calculate actual food cost % and compare it over three months.
If actual is above predicted, check waste and portions before changing prices.

Start with your five best-selling dishes. Cost them properly this week, check their prices, and do your first full stock count at the end of the month. Once you have three months of figures, you will know your own food cost and whether it is moving in the right direction.