Recipe and plate cost calculator
Add a row per ingredient, adjust for trim loss where it matters, and get cost per portion plus the menu price that hits your target. Runs in your browser, no signup, nothing stored.
Blank means no trim loss.
Blank means no trim loss.
Blank means no trim loss.
What you want this item to cost you.
Total recipe cost
$0.00
Cost per portion
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Add a portion count.
Suggested menu price
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The formula
Line cost = (Unit cost ÷ Yield %) × Quantity used
Cost per portion = Total recipe cost ÷ Portions
Suggested price = Cost per portion ÷ Target food cost %
Three steps, and the middle one is where most spreadsheets go wrong. Yield percentage converts an as-purchased price into an edible-portion price. Anything you trim, peel, bone out, or cook down costs more per usable ounce than the invoice says.
The standard textbook example: 50 pounds of potatoes trim down to 42.5 pounds, which is an 85% yield. At $0.60 a pound as purchased, the usable potato costs $0.60 ÷ 0.85 = $0.71 a pound. Cost the recipe at $0.60 and you’re 15% light on every dish that uses them. Leave the yield field blank for anything you use whole, which for a café is most of the shelf.
A worked example
A batch of soup that portions into 12 bowls:
- Stock, $0.18 per cup, 14 cups used, no trim loss: $2.52
- Onions, $1.10 per pound as purchased, 2 pounds, 88% yield: $2.50
- Carrots, $0.95 per pound as purchased, 1.5 pounds, 80% yield: $1.78
- Cream, $3.40 per quart, 1 quart: $3.40
- Seasoning and oil: $0.85
Total recipe cost = $11.05
Cost per bowl = 11.05 ÷ 12 = $0.92
At a 28% target: 0.92 ÷ 0.28 = $3.29
The suggested price is arithmetic, not a decision. Round it to what your menu looks like and what the block will pay. If the honest answer is that $3.29 rounds to $4.00, you’ve found margin. If it rounds to $3.00, you’ve found an item to watch.
What the calculator leaves out
Culinary references teach a Q factor: an allowance of roughly 5-10% added to plate cost for the things nobody itemizes, like bread on the table, condiments, garnish, and small waste. We left it out of the widget because it’s a kitchen convention rather than a published standard, and because it varies wildly between a café and a steakhouse. If you want it, raise your target food cost by a couple of points instead. Same effect, fewer invented numbers.
Labor is out too. A costed plate tells you about ingredients. Something that takes forty minutes of prep can price out beautifully and still lose money once a cook is standing over it, which is what the prime cost calculator is for.
Where recipe costing goes wrong
- Costing from the as-purchased price. The single biggest error, and it always runs in the same direction: the dish looks cheaper than it is.
- Mismatched units. A per-case cost against a per-portion quantity. Get the pack size and the unit right once and the rest follows.
- Stale prices. A recipe costed on last spring’s invoices is historical fiction. Dairy and produce move enough in six months to swallow a menu price increase whole.
- Forgetting packaging. For a café, the cup, lid, sleeve, and straw can be a fifth of the cost of a drink. They belong in the recipe.
- Costing a sub-recipe once. If a sauce goes into six dishes, a price change in the sauce moves all six, and doing that by hand is how costing quietly stops happening.
Questions we get
What does yield percentage do to the cost?
It converts the price you paid into the price of the part you can actually serve. Fifty pounds of potatoes that trim down to 42.5 pounds is an 85% yield, so $0.60 a pound as purchased is really $0.71 a pound on the plate. Skip it and every trimmed ingredient is costed too low.
What quantity unit should I use?
Whatever unit your cost is in, as long as the two match. If the cost is per ounce, the quantity is in ounces. Mixing a per-case price with a per-portion quantity is the fastest way to get a recipe cost that's off by a factor of twelve.
How do I pick a target food cost percentage?
Start with what the category can carry. Drinks usually come in well under 25%, and food items in the high twenties to low thirties. The suggested price is a starting point, not a verdict: check it against what your neighborhood actually pays before you print a menu.
Should I add labor into the recipe cost?
Not here. Plate cost is ingredients, and labor is handled on the prime cost side. Prep-heavy items are the exception worth watching — if something takes an hour of a cook's time, the food cost percentage will look fine while the item still loses money.
How often do recipe costs need updating?
Every time an ingredient price moves, which in practice means every delivery. That's the part nobody keeps up with by hand, and it's why a costed spreadsheet is usually wrong within a month of being built.
Other free calculators
- Food cost calculator — Period food cost from your two counts and your invoices, plus plate cost for a single item.
- Prime cost calculator — COGS plus fully loaded labor against sales — the number that decides whether a month works.
- ShelfCount pricing — one plan, $50 a month, every feature included.
Sources
- BCcampus Open Textbook, Basic Kitchen and Food Service Management — Yield Testing
- Culinary Math (open textbook) — Edible Portion Cost
- Penn State, Introduction to Food Production and Service (open textbook), Ch. 8: Menu and Recipe Pricing
Written by the ShelfCount team. We run Stella Coffee in Los Angeles and built these for our own back office first. Last checked August 2026.
ShelfCount recosts every recipe on its own when an invoice price changes, prep recipes and sub-recipes included, so the plate cost you costed in March is still right in August.