How to work out the food cost of a dish (and what to charge)

Ask a chef what a dish costs and you usually get a number said with confidence and worked out from memory. Ask for the sum behind it and the confidence goes. That's normal: nobody weighs trim in the middle of service. But the price on your menu rests on that number, and if the number is a feeling, so is the price.

Food cost is the least glamorous calculation in a restaurant and the one everything else sits on. Menu engineering, dropping a dish, the nerve to put a plate at 26 € — they all start from what that plate costs you tonight.

What actually goes into a plate cost

The raw-material cost of a dish is the sum of the ingredients that end up on the plate, plus the part you paid for and threw away. Three rules make it honest:

• Weigh the recipe for real. Not "roughly 100 g of beef": the gram weight you actually use, taken once with scales in a quiet moment.
• Cost what you buy, not what you serve. If you trim 20% off a cut of beef, the plate carries the price of the whole piece, not the trimmed one.
• Count the small things. Oil, butter, salt, the splash of wine in the pan, the herbs on top. Individually they're cents; across a full menu they're the difference between a plate that earns and a plate that doesn't.

And ingredient prices belong to the venue, not to a single menu: beef shin costs what it costs whether it goes into the ragù or the pie. Price it once, use it everywhere — that's how Menudetto stores it too, so one supplier update moves every dish that uses the ingredient.

A worked example, step by step

Pappardelle with beef ragù. Menu price 15.40 € including 10% VAT. Here's the plate, ingredient by ingredient.

• Beef shin. You buy it at 11.00 € per kg and lose 20% in trim. The recipe needs 90 g of trimmed meat, so you must buy 90 ÷ 0.80 = 112.5 g. Cost: 0.1125 × 11.00 = 1.24 €.
• "00" flour, 80 g at 1.40 €/kg = 0.11 €.
• Egg, one per portion at 0.32 € = 0.32 €.
• Soffritto (onion, carrot, celery), 60 g trimmed with 20% waste, so 75 g bought at 2.20 €/kg = 0.17 €.
• Tomato passata, 80 g at 1.60 €/kg = 0.13 €.
• Red wine, 40 ml from a 5.00 € bottle of 750 ml = 0.27 €.
• Parmesan, 12 g at 14.00 €/kg = 0.17 €.
• Oil, butter, salt, pepper: 0.14 €.

Plate cost: 2.55 €.

Now the two numbers people mix up.

Food-cost percentage compares the plate cost to the price net of VAT, never to the price on the menu. 15.40 € including 10% VAT is 14.00 € net. So 2.55 ÷ 14.00 = 18.2%.

Contribution margin is what's left in euros: 14.00 − 2.55 = 11.45 € per plate.

Both matter, and they say different things.

Why euros beat percentages

Percentages are how you compare dishes to each other. Euros are how you pay the rent.

Put that pasta next to a steak that costs you 9.00 € and sells at 28.60 € including VAT — 26.00 € net. Its food cost is 9.00 ÷ 26.00 = 34.6%, nearly twice the pasta's percentage. And it leaves 17.00 € a plate against the pasta's 11.45 €.

Which is the better dish? Neither, on those numbers alone — it depends on how many go out. Thirty pastas leave 30 × 11.45 = 343.50 €; eight steaks leave 8 × 17.00 = 136.00 €.

So: the percentage is a health check on one dish; the euros per plate, multiplied by how often it sells, are what your month is made of. Crossing those two numbers across the whole menu is menu engineering — it starts exactly where this calculation ends.

Margin is not profit

The most expensive misreading in this business: seeing 11.45 € and thinking you earned 11.45 €.

You earned 11.45 € towards everything that isn't food. Out of that plate still come:

• wages, for the person who cooked it and the person who carried it;
• rent and rates on the room it was eaten in;
• gas, electricity, water, the dishwasher, the ticket printer;
• the prep that went in the bin, the dish sent back, the stock that turned;
• insurance, card fees, the accountant, tax.

Call it contribution margin and the word does its job: it's what this dish contributes to costs that exist whether or not anybody orders it. Profit is whatever survives at the bottom of the month — and a menu of healthy percentages still loses money if the euros per plate never add up to the fixed costs.

From cost to selling price

Work in this order.

1. Start with a floor, not a price. Pick the food-cost percentage you want to work at and divide. At 30%: 2.55 ÷ 0.30 = 8.50 € net, which is 9.35 € on the menu with 10% VAT. That's the floor — the point below which the dish stops paying its way.

2. Then look outside. What do comparable plates go for in your street, at your service level? A rule that says 9.35 € for a dish the neighbourhood happily pays 15 € for costs you 5.65 € a cover.

3. Then check the euros. At 15.40 € the pasta leaves 11.45 €; at 9.35 € it leaves 5.95 €. Same plate, same cost, nearly double the contribution. The percentage rule alone would have talked you out of it.

4. Then round it like a human. Where the final digit lands, how you write the number, what sits next to it on the page — that's its own craft, covered in the guide to menu pricing.

A partial total is worse than no total

If you cost that ragù and forget the wine and the parmesan, you get 2.11 € instead of 2.55 €. It looks like a total, so you price off it — and you're 44 cents light on every plate, which across thirty plates a night is 13.20 € out of the door.

This is why Menudetto refuses to show a total until every ingredient has a price. You'll see which ones are missing, and no number underneath. A blank is annoying; a plausible wrong number is expensive.

Ingredient prices go stale on their own

You cost a dish once and it's right once. Beef shin goes from 11.00 € to 12.60 € a kilo — up 14.5% — and the plate you never touched now costs 2.73 € instead of 2.55 €. The food cost drifts from 18.2% to 19.5%; the margin quietly drops from 11.45 € to 11.27 €. One ingredient, one dish. Multiply by a delivery a week and a menu of thirty items.

The fix isn't to recost everything every month — it's to let the invoices update the prices. If you're in Italy, Menudetto reads the FatturaPA XML — the Italian electronic invoice your accountant sends or your back-office exports — line by line: "from 12.00 to 14.20 € per kg, +18.3%, changes the cost of 1 dish". You match each line to an ingredient the first time; after that it recognises them by itself, and nothing moves until you confirm it. It reads that Italian XML format only, and it's part of the Pro plan.

Start with one dish

Take the dish you sell most of and cost it properly tonight — real weights, trim included, nothing left out. The free food-cost calculator does the arithmetic for you: no sign-up, no account, ingredients in and plate cost, percentage and margin out.

Then keep it. Inside Menudetto you write the recipe in chat — or say it out loud — and the dish tells you its cost per portion, its share of the menu price, and what's left to cover staff, rent, utilities, waste and tax. The free plan holds ten dishes with recipes, reading your costs is never paywalled, and dropping back to free deletes nothing. Create your menu free and cost three dishes: by tomorrow you'll know something about your margins you don't know now — and you'll be ready for the menu engineering guide, which picks up exactly here.