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Free tool · Restaurants and F&B

Food cost calculator

Price one dish honestly. Enter what goes into the plate and what you charge for it, and this works out your food cost percentage, your margin per plate, and the price you would need to hit a target. Nothing is sent anywhere - it all runs in your browser.

1. What goes into the plate

2. Packaging and price

Food cost—
Plate cost—
Margin per plate—
Price at target—

Add your ingredients above to see the numbers.

Use the price excluding GST - the tax is not yours to keep. Rent, salaries, electricity and delivery commissions are real costs but they are not food cost; keep them out so the number stays comparable.

What food cost percentage actually tells you

Food cost percentage is the share of a dish's selling price that gets eaten by what went into it. Sell a plate for 200 rupees that cost 60 to make and your food cost is 30 percent, leaving 140 rupees of gross margin to cover everything else - the rent, the salaries, the gas, the delivery commission and, eventually, your profit.

It is the most useful single number on a menu because it is the one you can move. You do not control what a landlord charges or what an aggregator takes. You do control your recipes, your portion sizes, your suppliers and your prices.

What belongs in the plate cost, and what does not

Include everything that physically reaches the customer: the ingredients in the quantities you actually use, not the quantities in the recipe you wrote once, and packaging for anything that leaves the building. A delivery dish costed without its container, lid, bag and cutlery looks more profitable than it is, and the gap grows with volume.

Leave out rent, salaries, electricity, gas, rider commissions and marketing. They are real and they matter, but they belong in your overall P and L rather than in food cost. Mixing them in produces a number you cannot compare to anything, including your own figure from last month.

What counts as a good number

There is no universal answer, and anyone quoting one without asking what you sell is guessing. A beverage-led cafe and an ingredient-heavy grill room are different businesses with different economics, and a delivery-only kitchen has to absorb packaging and commission that a dine-in restaurant does not. Set a target that fits your own format, then watch the direction of travel rather than the absolute number. A food cost that has drifted up four points since March is telling you something regardless of where it started.

Four ways the number comes down

  1. Portion control. The gap between the recipe and what the kitchen actually serves is usually the largest single leak, and it is invisible without weighing. It is also the cheapest to fix.
  2. Purchase prices. Rates move constantly on fresh produce. A dish costed in March at March prices is fiction by August unless someone recosts it.
  3. Wastage. Spoilage, over-prep and staff meals are food cost whether or not anyone records them. If your calculated cost looks healthy but the bank balance disagrees, this is usually where the difference lives.
  4. Menu mix. You do not have to fix a bad dish. Selling more of the good ones moves your blended food cost just as effectively, and menu design is what decides which ones sell.

Doing this for a whole menu

A calculator is good for spot-checking one dish or sanity-testing a price before you print a menu. It goes stale the moment your supplier changes a rate, and nobody recalculates eighty dishes by hand.

That is the job of recipe management inside the POS: every dish carries its recipe, so selling it deducts the exact ingredients from stock and the food cost updates as purchase prices change. Paired with ingredient-level inventory, the difference between what should have been consumed and what actually left the store becomes a wastage figure in rupees rather than a suspicion. That is the version that survives contact with a real kitchen.

See your own menu costed automatically - recipes, live ingredient stock and food cost per dish on a working DINO counter.

Related reading

Cloud kitchen POS covers why food cost matters most when there is no dining room to watch, cafe billing software covers milk and pastry wastage in a high-count counter business, and KOT vs KDS explains the kitchen side of the flow. For the whole F and B platform, see DINO and restaurants on NukkadShops.

Questions, answered.

How do you calculate food cost percentage?

Divide what the dish costs to make by what you sell it for, then multiply by 100. A plate that costs 60 rupees in ingredients and sells for 200 has a food cost of 30 percent. Use the price excluding GST, because the tax is not yours to keep.

What should be included in the cost of a dish?

Everything that physically goes into what the customer receives: ingredients in the recipe quantities you actually use, plus packaging for takeaway and delivery. Leave out rent, salaries, electricity and rider commissions - those are real costs but they are not food cost, and mixing them makes the number impossible to compare.

What is a good food cost percentage for a restaurant?

It depends on format rather than on a universal number. Beverage-led and quick-service operations usually run lower, ingredient-heavy and premium menus run higher, and delivery-led kitchens have to absorb packaging and commission on top. Set a target for your own format and track movement against it, rather than chasing someone else's benchmark.

Should I include packaging in food cost?

For takeaway and delivery, yes. The container, lid, bag, cutlery and label are bought fresh for every order and scale exactly with volume, so a delivery dish that ignores packaging looks more profitable than it is. This calculator has a separate packaging field for that reason.

How do I do this for a whole menu instead of one dish?

One dish at a time on a calculator is fine for spot-checking, but it goes stale the moment ingredient rates move. Recipe management in a POS does it continuously: each dish carries its recipe, selling it deducts the exact ingredients from stock, and the food cost updates as your purchase prices change.

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