Dish cost calculator
Type your pack prices and your portions. Get the plate cost, the gross profit and the GP % for one dish.
Nothing to sign up for and no email asked. It is already filled in with a carbonara, so you can change one line and see what happens.
a plate of carbonara, set lunch
Based on 7 ingredients and the portions you typed. Arithmetic only — we round to the penny and nothing else.
| Gross profit a plate | £0.31 |
| GP % | 4.5% |
| Food cost % | 95.5% |
A suggestion, not a recommendation. 70.0% GP is the usual target for a UK independent, before drinks.
That was one dish. We can do your whole menu, and draft the recipes for you, so you type nothing.
Estimate my whole menu — $29 →Photograph your menu and up to five recent supplier invoices. We read the prices, draft a recipe for every dish, and send back a Margin Table with the worst plate at the top.
The sum is easy. Keeping it current is the hard part.
Costing one plate takes four numbers per ingredient: what the pack cost, how big the pack was, how much lands on the plate, and what you charge. Divide, multiply, add up. That is the whole method, and the calculator above does it.
What to put in a plate cost
- —Every food ingredient. Including the oil, the butter and the seasoning. Small lines add up across a service.
- —The garnish and the side. Bread, salad, a lemon wedge. If it leaves the kitchen on the plate, it is in the cost.
- —Trim and waste. Price what you actually use. A 3 kg fish that yields 1.8 kg of fillet costs you the whole 3 kg.
- —Not labour or rent. Those are overheads, not plate cost. Gross profit is measured before them, on purpose.
GP % and food cost % are the same fact, twice
Food cost % is the plate cost divided by the menu price. GP % is what is left. A £6.95 carbonara costing £6.64 runs a 95.5% food cost, so a 4.5% GP. That dish is not a margin problem. That dish is an emergency.
Most UK independents aim for about 70.0% GP across the food menu. No single dish has to hit it. The mix does, so a low-GP steak is fine if the pasta carries it.
Why the spreadsheet stops being true
You can cost forty dishes on a Sunday, honestly, and be right. Then butter moves 11%, chicken moves twice, and your supplier changes a pack size. Six weeks later every number on that sheet is fiction, and nobody has an evening to redo it.
That is the actual job: not the sum, the upkeep. Which is why we start from your invoices and your menu rather than an empty recipe book.
Questions people ask
How do you work out the cost of one dish?
Take each ingredient's pack price, divide by the pack size, then multiply by the portion on the plate. Add every line together. That total is the plate cost.
What GP % should a restaurant dish make?
Most UK independents aim for about 70% gross profit on food, which is a 30% food cost. Set lunches and steaks usually sit lower, and pasta and soup higher.
Should waste and prep loss be in the plate cost?
Yes, if you know it. Price the trimmed weight rather than the raw weight, or add a line for the trim you throw away.
Also useful: the food cost percentage calculator for your whole month, rather than one plate.
Forty dishes is forty times that form. We would rather do it from your menu.
Photograph your menu and a few invoices. We draft a recipe for every dish and send back your plates, worst first.
Every dish figure we send is an estimate, shown with the invoice lines and the portions we drafted. If we cannot make a useful report from your invoices, we refund without being asked.