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Free tool · Restaurants and F&B

Monthly food cost calculator

The number your recipes cannot tell you. Enter what the kitchen held, bought and had left, and what it sold, and this works out your real food cost for the month, how far it sits from your target, and how much of the gap your wastage log explains. Nothing is sent anywhere - it all runs in your browser.

1. What the kitchen used this month

2. What it sold, and what you aim for

Monthly food cost-
Food used (consumption)-
Food cost at target-
Gap to target-

Enter your stock counts, purchases and sales to see the numbers.

Value stock at the last price you paid, count on the same day each month before deliveries, and use sales excluding GST. The figures shown are a worked example.

How to calculate monthly food cost

Monthly food cost percentage is what the kitchen used in a month, divided by what it sold, times 100. What it used is worked out from stock, not from recipes: the value of stock at the start of the month, plus everything bought during it, minus the value of stock left at the end. Whatever is not on the shelf at month-end was used, and that is the cost of the food you sold.

The formula in one line: (opening stock + purchases - closing stock) / food sales x 100. Use food purchases and food sales only. Liquor, if you serve it, is counted separately because its margins are different and mixing the two hides both.

The example loaded above is a mid-sized kitchen: 1,20,000 rupees on the shelves on the first of the month, 3,40,000 bought, 1,10,000 left on the last day. That is 3,50,000 of food used against 11,00,000 of sales, a food cost of 31.8 percent. Against a 30 percent target it is 1.8 points over, which sounds small until you see it as 20,000 rupees of food in one month that did not turn into a sale.

How to take the two stock counts

The calculation is only as good as the counts, and the counts are only comparable if they are taken the same way each time. Count on the same day of the month, at the same time, before the day's deliveries arrive, so the opening count for one month is the closing count for the last. Include the store room, the walk-in, the freezer and the line fridges; food on the line is still stock.

Value each item at the last price you paid for it, not the price on an old invoice. A kitchen that costs its stock at March prices in August understates consumption exactly when produce prices have moved. Count in the units you buy in, kilos, litres, crates, and let the price per unit do the conversion.

Why the monthly number is higher than your plate costs

If you have priced dishes with the plate-level food cost calculator, you have a blended food cost for the menu as designed. The monthly figure is the menu as cooked, and it is nearly always higher. The difference has five usual causes: portions that have drifted above the recipe, trimmings and over-prep that went in the bin, produce that spoiled before it was used, staff meals nobody recorded, and stock that left the building without a bill.

That difference is called variance, and it is the most useful number this page can point you towards without being able to compute it. A calculator can tell you the gap between actual and target. Only a ledger that knows what each dish sold should have consumed can tell you how much of the gap is portioning, how much is wastage and how much is leakage.

What counts as a good monthly food cost

The same answer as for plate cost: it depends on what you sell, and anyone quoting a universal number is guessing. A beverage-led cafe, a biryani kitchen and a delivery-only brand absorbing packaging and commission are different businesses. Set the target that your pricing was built on, then watch two things. First, the trend: three months of the number creeping up is a portioning or purchasing problem forming. Second, the gap between this figure and your blended plate cost: if your recipes say 28 percent and your stock says 33, the five points are operational, not a pricing problem, and raising prices will not fix them.

A month-end routine that takes about an hour

  1. Count and value the stock on the same day each month, before deliveries, at last purchase price.
  2. Total the month's food purchases from supplier invoices, excluding liquor, packaging and cleaning supplies.
  3. Pull food sales excluding GST from the POS. Discounts and complimentary dishes reduce sales, so use net sales.
  4. Run the three numbers through the calculator and record the percentage next to last month's.
  5. Compare against the blended plate cost of what actually sold. The gap is your variance for the month; if it is growing, weigh portions for a week and log every bin for a week before you touch prices.

Where the hand-work goes away

Everything above is what an ingredient-level inventory system does continuously. On DINO, restaurant inventory records purchases into stock as they arrive, every dish billed deducts the ingredients in its recipe, wastage is logged where it happens, and the expected stock is compared with the actual count. The monthly food cost falls out of the ledger rather than a spreadsheet, and the variance is broken down by ingredient, so "stock seems to vanish" becomes a number with a name attached.

See your own kitchen's food cost as a live number - purchases in, recipe consumption out, variance by ingredient, on a working DINO counter.

Related reading

Price one dish first with the food cost calculator. Restaurant billing software covers what the POS has to do before any of these numbers exist, cloud kitchen POS covers why food cost matters most when there is no dining room to watch, and restaurants on NukkadShops is the whole platform in one place.

Questions, answered.

How do you calculate food cost for a month?

Add the value of stock at the start of the month to everything you bought during it, subtract the stock left at the end, and you have what the kitchen used. Divide that by food sales excluding GST and multiply by 100. A kitchen that opened with 1,20,000 rupees of stock, bought 3,40,000 and closed with 1,10,000 used 3,50,000; on 11,00,000 of sales that is a food cost of 31.8 percent.

What is the difference between plate food cost and monthly food cost?

Plate food cost is what a dish should cost according to its recipe. Monthly food cost is what the kitchen actually used, counted from stock. The monthly figure is nearly always higher, and the gap between the two is over-portioning, wastage, staff meals and leakage. The plate number tells you how to price; the monthly number tells you how the kitchen is run.

How often should I count stock?

Monthly is the minimum for this calculation to mean anything, and weekly for the ten or fifteen ingredients that make up most of your spend. Count on the same day each period, before deliveries arrive, and value everything at the last price you paid for it.

Should staff meals and wastage be counted in food cost?

They are already in it, whether or not you record them, because they left the store room without producing a sale. Logging them separately does not change the monthly percentage; it explains it. A kitchen with 3.5 percent of consumption in logged wastage has a very different problem from one where the same gap is unexplained.

Why does my monthly food cost not match my recipe costs?

Because recipes describe the plate as designed and stock counts describe the kitchen as run. Portions drift up, trimmings go in the bin, produce spoils, prices move between costing and purchase, and some stock leaves without a bill. The difference is called variance, and finding it is the whole point of counting.

Can a POS do this automatically?

Yes, if it holds stock at ingredient level. On DINO, purchases are recorded into stock, every dish billed deducts its recipe's ingredients, wastage is logged where it happens, and the expected stock is compared with the actual count. The monthly figure then falls out of the ledger instead of a spreadsheet, and the variance is broken down by ingredient.

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