Food Cost Calculator

Between 28% and 35% for most formats, but the useful answer depends entirely on your format. Quick service and fast casual run 25 to 30%, casual dining 28 to 32%, fine dining 30 to 35%, pizzerias 22 to 28% and beverage-led bars 20 to 25%. A pizzeria at 35% has a real problem while a fine dining room at 28% may be under-investing in ingredients. Compare against your format and against your own recent weeks.

Divide cost of goods sold by food revenue for the same period and multiply by 100. COGS is opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory, which measures what you actually consumed rather than what you spent. Using purchases alone instead of COGS is the commonest error, and it makes the figure swing wildly whenever stock levels change between periods.

Prime cost is COGS plus total labour, including wages, payroll taxes and benefits, and the target is 55 to 65% of revenue depending on format. It matters more than food cost alone because the two expenses trade against each other: a restaurant can show an excellent 28% food cost and still lose money if labour is at 40%. Prime cost captures the two things an operator genuinely controls.

Because identical prime costs can conceal opposite problems. A restaurant at 26% food and 36% labour and one at 35% food and 27% labour both run 62% prime, but the first is over-staffed or under-productive while the second is buying badly or over-portioning. The remedies have nothing in common, so the headline number alone cannot tell you what to do.

It usually lowers food cost and raises labour, and whether that is a gain depends on the exchange rate. Moving from prepared to scratch production might cut three points of food cost while adding five points of labour, which improves the number most operators watch and worsens the one that pays the rent. Always evaluate the change against prime cost, not food cost.

Weekly. A monthly figure arrives too late to act on, by which point the cause has usually disappeared. Weekly numbers are noisier and a one to two point swing between weeks is normal, but a consistent trend over three or four weeks is real. The cost of getting a usable number is the discipline of counting inventory every week, which is precisely where most operations fall down.

Verify the inventory count before anything else, because an estimated closing count invalidates the entire calculation and a single miscounted case can move the percentage by a point. Then check portioning at the pass, since portion drift is silent and cumulative. Then compare current invoice prices against what your recipes assume. Then look at waste and over-production. Repricing is the last lever, because it is the only one guests notice.

Track it separately. Beverage runs at a very different cost percentage — often 20 to 25% for a bar programme and lower still for spirits — so blending it into food cost flatters the kitchen and hides problems in both. Most operators calculate food cost against food revenue and beverage cost against beverage revenue, then combine only at the COGS line for prime cost.

Not necessarily. A food cost well below the band for your format usually means portions have shrunk, quality has been substituted downward, or prices have moved ahead of what the concept supports. All three erode value perception, and the damage shows up in covers rather than in the cost line, where it is much harder to trace. Check that guest counts are holding before treating a low number as a win.

Typically 28 to 32% on food, but the figure is misleading in isolation because delivery platform commissions of 15 to 30% of order value sit outside food cost entirely. A ghost kitchen with an excellent food cost can still be unprofitable once commission is taken, so the meaningful measure for delivery-only operations is contribution after commission rather than food cost percentage.