Restaurant Food Cost Calculator

Food cost percentage is how much of a dish’s menu price is eaten by the ingredients on the plate.
It is the number every kitchen watches, because it is the one an operator can actually move week to week. Rent is fixed for years. Portion size, supplier, and menu price are not.

Food Cost % = Ingredient Cost ÷ Menu Price × 100

A dish that costs you $3.50 in ingredients and sells for $12.00 runs at 29.2% food cost. Turn that around and you get the markup: 12.00 ÷ 3.50 = 3.43x. Both numbers describe the same dish, and different people in a kitchen tend to think in one or the other.

What the calculator grades your dish against:

Those bands are a general kitchen scale. Match them against your own format before acting on them: fast casual usually targets 25-30%, full service 28-35%, and fine dining runs 28-38% because the plate cost is genuinely higher and the check absorbs it.

Working backwards to a price. If you know what food cost you want, divide instead of multiply:

Menu Price = Ingredient Cost ÷ Target Food Cost

The same $3.50 plate at a 30% target wants $11.67, so $11.95 on the menu is the round-up that gets you there. This is the single most useful thing on the page. Most menu pricing arguments end the moment someone does this division out loud.

Ingredient cost means the whole plate. The mistake that wrecks these numbers is costing only the protein. Count the sauce, the starch, the garnish, the butter in the pan, the bread that goes out with it, and the oil the fryer drank. Include yield loss too: if you buy a 5 lb whole fish and get 2.2 lb of usable fillet, your cost per usable pound is more than double the invoice price.

Where food cost fits in the bigger picture. On its own it is only half the story. The metric that decides whether a restaurant survives is prime cost:

Prime Cost = Food Cost + Beverage Cost + Labor Cost

Prime cost wants to land below 60-65% of revenue. A kitchen can hit 28% food cost and still fail on 42% labor. Watch both.

One caution about chasing a low number. A 22% food cost item looks wonderful on a spreadsheet and can still be the wrong dish to push, because percentage is not money. A pasta at 22% of a $14 plate keeps $10.92. A steak at 38% of a $34 plate keeps $21.08. If the two take the same effort to fire, the steak is the better sale, and it is the one most food-cost reports quietly argue against.