Enter your ingredient cost and menu price to see your food cost percentage, profit per plate, and the price you'd need to charge to hit your target.
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The restaurant industry benchmark is 28-35% food cost percentage. Fine dining runs lower (25-30%) due to higher menu prices. Fast casual runs higher (30-38%). If your food cost exceeds 35%, portion control, waste, or supplier pricing is likely the issue.
Divide the cost of ingredients for a dish by the menu price, then multiply by 100. Example: if a dish costs $4.50 to make and sells for $15, food cost percentage is 30%. This calculator handles the math for your whole operation based on ingredient cost and covers per day.
Common causes: over-portioning, high food waste and spoilage, theft, inaccurate recipe costing, vendor price increases not passed to the menu, or running too many low-margin items. Track each dish individually to find the outliers.
A restaurant with $500K revenue at 30% food cost spends $150K on food. Dropping to 28% saves $10K per year - without changing revenue. For most restaurants, a 1-2 point reduction in food cost goes directly to the bottom line.
Food cost covers ingredients only. Prime cost adds labor (cooks, servers, dishwashers) - typically the two largest expenses. Prime cost above 65% of revenue signals a profitability problem. Most healthy restaurants keep prime cost at 55-60%.
Negotiate supplier contracts, standardize portion sizes with weight-based portioning, reduce menu complexity, track waste daily, run specials to move near-expiry inventory, and review low-margin items. Even a 2% improvement on $800K revenue is $16,000 in recovered profit.
No. Third-party delivery fees (15-30% of order value) come out of revenue, not food cost. But they dramatically change your effective margin on delivery orders. Many restaurants set delivery-specific menu prices 15-20% higher to compensate.