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Two food cost calculators for the numbers that decide whether a month made money: what a plate should cost, and what the kitchen actually used. No sign-up, no email gate. They run in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
What's here
Pick a calculator
Food cost calculator, per plate
Enter a dish's ingredients, packaging and selling price to get its food cost percentage, plate cost, margin per plate and the price you would need to charge to hit a target.
Use it when you are pricing a dish or checking a menu before it is printed.Monthly food cost calculator
Enter opening stock, purchases, closing stock and food sales to get the real food cost of the month, the rupee gap to your target and how much of it your wastage log explains.
Use it at month-end, after the stock count.Which one
Plate cost or monthly cost: which number do you need?
They answer different questions, and a kitchen needs both.
| The question | Use | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Is this dish priced right? | Plate calculator | Food cost percentage of one dish, and the price that hits your target. |
| Can I afford this new supplier's rate? | Plate calculator | Change one ingredient's cost and watch the percentage move. |
| Should I include the delivery box? | Plate calculator | Packaging has its own field, because it scales with every order. |
| What did the kitchen actually spend this month? | Monthly calculator | Consumption from stock counts, as a percentage of sales. |
| Why is the bank balance lower than the menu says it should be? | Monthly calculator | The gap between actual and target in rupees, and how much of it is logged wastage. |
| Is the kitchen drifting? | Both | Monthly figure minus blended plate cost is your variance. If it grows, the problem is portions, wastage or leakage, not pricing. |
The maths
The two formulas, in plain words
Plate food cost
Plate cost / selling price x 100. Plate cost is every ingredient in the quantity you actually serve, plus packaging for anything that leaves the building. Selling price is excluding GST, because the tax is not yours to keep. A plate that costs 60 rupees and sells for 200 runs at 30 percent.
Monthly food cost
(Opening stock + purchases - closing stock) / food sales x 100. Count stock on the same day each month, before deliveries, valued at the last price paid. Whatever is not on the shelf at month-end was used. 3,50,000 rupees used against 11,00,000 of sales runs at 31.8 percent.
Why both
The plate is the menu as designed. The month is the kitchen as run.
A recipe costed on the plate calculator tells you what a dish should cost, and a menu full of them gives you a blended food cost for the whole card. That is the pricing number, and it is the one to get right before anything is printed.
A stock count at month-end tells you what the kitchen actually used. It is nearly always higher than the blended plate cost, because portions drift, trimmings go in the bin, produce spoils, staff eat and some stock leaves without a bill. The difference between the two figures is variance, and it is the number that separates a kitchen with a pricing problem from a kitchen with an operations problem. Raising prices fixes the first. Weighing portions and logging the bin fixes the second.
Neither calculator can compute the variance by itself, because that needs to know what every dish sold should have consumed. That is the job of recipe management and ingredient-level inventory in DINO: purchases in, recipe consumption out as dishes are billed, wastage logged where it happens, and expected stock compared with the actual count, by ingredient.
More on the way
How a tool earns a place here
It answers a question owners actually ask
Both calculators exist because the question came up on demo calls, week after week, and the search data agreed. A tool nobody asked for is a page nobody uses.
The maths ties to something the platform does
A calculator is the hand version of a report DINO produces continuously. If there is no report behind it, we do not build the calculator. If there is a number you keep working out by hand, tell us.
Questions, answered.
What tools are on this page?
Two food cost calculators for restaurants, cafes and cloud kitchens. The plate calculator prices one dish from its ingredients, packaging and selling price. The monthly calculator works out the real food cost of a month from opening stock, purchases, closing stock and sales. Both are free and run in your browser.
Which food cost calculator should I use first?
Start with the plate calculator when you are pricing a dish or checking a menu before it is printed. Use the monthly calculator at each month-end to see what the kitchen actually used. The gap between the two is your variance, and it is usually the more important number.
Is anything I type sent to NukkadShops?
No. The calculators run entirely in your browser and nothing you enter leaves your device. There is no sign-up and no email gate. The only thing that reaches us is a demo request if you choose to send one.
Can the POS do these calculations automatically?
Yes. DINO holds every dish as a recipe, so the plate cost updates as purchase prices change, and it holds stock at ingredient level, so the monthly consumption and the variance against the count fall out of the ledger instead of a spreadsheet.
Where the numbers come from