How much does a carbonara cost to make?
£2.42 a plate, at UK wholesale prices we checked on 23 August 2026. On a £14.50 menu price that is 80.0% gross profit. Here is every line of it.
Real pack prices from a UK foodservice wholesaler, a 120 g restaurant portion, and the arithmetic shown. Your suppliers will differ — that is the interesting part, and we get to it below.
| Ingredient | Pack | Pack price | Unit | On the plate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dried spaghetti | 5 kg | £8.99 | £1.80 / kg | 120 g | £0.22 |
| Smoked streaky bacon | 900 g | £20.99 | £23.32 / kg | 60 g | £1.40 |
| Grana Padano, grated | 1 kg | £14.99 | £14.99 / kg | 20 g | £0.30 |
| Free-range eggs | tray of 60 | £13.49 | £0.22 each | 2 eggs | £0.45 |
| Black pepper, whole | 1 kg | £16.99 | £16.99 / kg | 1 g | £0.02 |
| Extra virgin olive oil | 5 L | £28.99 | £5.80 / L | 5 ml | £0.03 |
| Plate cost | — | — | — | — | £2.42 |
£14.50 on the menu is £12.08 net of 20% VAT. Take £2.42 off that and £9.66 a plate is yours.
| Menu price, as printed | £14.50 |
| Net of 20% VAT | £12.08 |
| Plate cost | £2.42 |
| Gross profit a plate | £9.66 |
| Food cost % | 20.0% |
| If you forget the VAT | 83.3% |
One ingredient is 57.9% of the plate. Everything else is noise.
The bacon costs £1.40 of the £2.42. The pasta, the egg, the cheese, the pepper and the oil come to £1.02 between them. That single line is where the whole dish lives, and it is the only line on the docket worth negotiating, watching or portioning carefully.
Which is why the swap matters more than the recipe. The same 60 g at a cheaper trade streaky bacon we found at £7.66/kg drops the plate to £1.48 and takes the dish from 80.0% GP to 87.8% — 7.8 percentage points, £0.94 a plate, on one supplier line. Sell fifteen carbonaras a week and that is £733 a year, decided by a purchasing choice nobody wrote down.
You pay for two eggs to use one and a half
A proper carbonara is one whole egg and one extra yolk. You cannot buy a yolk. Unless the white goes into a meringue or a glaze the same week, you bought two eggs — £0.45, not £0.34 — and the honest costing is the one that charges you for what left the fridge, not what landed on the plate.
Eggs are also moving. UK farm-gate egg prices averaged 153.1p a dozen in Q2 2026, up 3.1% on the same quarter of 2025, according to the government’s quarterly egg statistics. That is £0.01 on this plate. It is also £0.01 on every plate with an egg in it, which nobody re-costs.
What we could not price honestly
We looked for a published wholesale price for guanciale, for pancetta and for Parmigiano Reggiano at UK foodservice suppliers on 23 August 2026, and did not find one we could cite. So the docket above uses what those suppliers actually list and price publicly: smoked streaky bacon and grated Grana Padano. If you buy real guanciale and real Parmigiano Reggiano, your plate cost is higher than £2.42 — probably by £0.60 to £1.20 — and the honest thing for us to do is say so rather than invent a number that looks authoritative.
This is also the argument for costing from your own invoices instead of from an article. Nothing on this page is your kitchen. The pack prices on your last delivery note are.
Cream: the £0.00 line
There is no cream in the docket, because there is no cream in a carbonara. If you add 100 ml, the cheapest 1 L double cream alternative we found priced was £3.49, so about £0.35 a plate — a 14.5% increase in the cost of the dish to make it worse. Costing occasionally settles an argument.
Do this for one dish, then look at your menu
A carbonara is the easy case: six lines, one of which matters. The dish that is actually losing you money is a dish with fourteen lines, a garnish, a side and a supplier who moved a pack size in April. You will not find it by picking a dish and costing it, because you would have to guess right first.
Questions people ask
How much does a carbonara cost to make in a restaurant?
At UK wholesale prices checked on 23 August 2026, a 120 g restaurant portion of spaghetti carbonara costs about £2.42 a plate: £0.22 of pasta, £1.40 of bacon, £0.45 of egg, £0.30 of cheese and £0.05 of pepper and oil. On a £14.50 menu price that is 80.0% gross profit once VAT is taken off.
Why is the bacon more than half the cost?
Because it is the only ingredient priced per kilo in the double figures. At £23.32/kg the 60 g of bacon is 57.9% of the whole plate. Everything else on the dish together comes to about a pound.
What should I charge for a carbonara?
To hit the standard 70.0% food GP on a £2.42 plate cost you would need £8.07 net of VAT, which is £9.68 on the menu at 20% VAT. Most restaurants charge more than that, because pasta is one of the dishes that carries the low-GP dishes on the rest of the menu.
Does this include labour and overheads?
No, and it should not. Gross profit is measured before labour, rent and energy on purpose, so that you can compare one dish against another. Labour belongs in the net profit line below it.
Pack prices are collection prices from JJ Foodservice’s public UK catalogue, checked 23 August 2026: Pasta Reggia spaghetti 5 kg £8.99, Grumpy Pigs smoked streaky bacon 900 g £20.99, grated Grana Padano 1 kg £14.99, free-range eggs tray of 60 £13.49, Natco whole black pepper 1 kg £16.99, extra virgin olive oil 5 L £28.99. The £7.66/kg comparison bacon is an indicative Brakes trade price. Egg inflation from the UK government’s Quarterly UK statistics about eggs, data to Q2 2026. Delivered prices at the same supplier run roughly 10-15% above collection. If a price here is more than 90 days old when you read it, treat it as history.
Do it with your own pack prices in the dish cost calculator, or check the VAT on your GP with the pub GP calculator.
That was one dish and six lines. We will do your whole menu from a photograph.
Photograph your menu and up to five recent supplier invoices. We draft a recipe for every dish, price it against your own delivery notes, and send your plates back worst first. You type nothing.
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.