How To

How to actually cost a dish

By José, Mise en Profit · The method, with a real example.

Costing a dish is not hard. Costing it accurately is where everyone slips. Most owners do a rough version, costing the obvious ingredients at the price on the invoice, and land on a number that feels right and is usually wrong by ten points or more. Here is the method that gets it right, in four steps, with a real example at the end.

Step 1: Cost every ingredient per gram, not per pack

You buy in packs and cases. You plate in grams. So convert. Take the pack price, divide by the number of grams in the pack, and you have a cost per gram for that ingredient. A $14 bag of chicken at 1,000 grams is $0.014 per gram. Do this once per ingredient and the rest of the math gets easy. This is the step that lets you cost a 180 gram portion instead of guessing at "about a third of the bag."

Step 2: Apply yield (this is the one everyone skips)

You do not plate what you buy. You trim, peel, and lose moisture in cooking. If you buy 1,000 grams of a protein and only 800 grams make it to the plate, your real cost per usable gram is higher than the purchase price suggests. Divide the ingredient cost by its yield percentage to get the true cost of what you actually serve. Skip this and every protein and vegetable on your menu is under-costed.

Step 3: Include your sub-recipes

The sauce, the stock, the dough. Each one has its own cost per portion (cost the batch, divide by how many portions it yields). Add that portion cost to the dish like any other ingredient. Leaving sub-recipes out is the second most common reason a dish cost comes out too low.

Step 4: Total it, then divide by your menu price

Add up every line: ingredients at cost per gram, adjusted for yield, plus sub-recipe portions, plus the small stuff (oil, seasoning, garnish). That total is your plate cost. Divide it by the menu price and you have the one number that matters: that dish's food cost percentage.

A real example

A grilled chicken plate on the menu at $22. Here is the rough version most owners run, next to the accurate one.

Now the rough version: skip the yield adjustment and forget the sauce, and you would have counted chicken at $2.80, plus potatoes, veg, and oil, for $4.67. That reads as 21 percent, and you would have walked away thinking that plate was a winner. It is actually running at 31 percent. A ten-point gap, created entirely by the two steps everyone skips.

Do this for your five best sellers

You do not need to cost the whole menu to start. Take your five highest-volume dishes and run them through these four steps. Rank them by food cost percentage. The worst one is almost never the dish you expected, and it is the first thing worth fixing. If you want the fast version, the free Menu Margin Check walks you through it in about five minutes.