Most chefs know their food is costing them money. Very few know exactly how much.
That gap — between suspecting a problem and being able to prove it — is where margin goes to die. You can feel it in a bad week on the pass. You can’t fix it without numbers.
This is how you get the numbers.
What Food Cost Actually Is
Food cost is the percentage of your revenue that went on ingredients. Not profit. Not labour. Just the cost of the food itself relative to what it brought in.
If you spent £3,500 on ingredients and took £10,000 in food sales, your food cost is 35%.
Simple enough. The complication is working out what you actually spent — because your invoices don’t tell you. Your stock movement does.
The Formula
Food Cost % = (Opening Stock + Purchases − Closing Stock) ÷ Food Sales × 100This is the one that matters. It accounts for what you actually used — not what you ordered, not what you received, but what left your kitchen as a dish.
Worked example:
- Opening stock: £8,500
- Purchases this period: £5,200
- Closing stock: £11,000
- Food sales: £7,500
(£8,500 + £5,200 − £11,000) ÷ £7,500 × 100 = 36%That 36% is your food cost for the period. Whether that’s acceptable depends on your operation. For most kitchens, you’re aiming to sit between 28% and 35%. Steak-heavy menus tend to sit toward the top of that range. Pasta and plant-based menus should sit lower.
If you’re consistently above 35% with no clear reason why, something is going wrong — over-ordering, waste, portioning, theft, or some combination of all four.
Cost Per Serving
The formula above tells you the health of the kitchen overall. Cost per serving tells you the health of each dish.
Cost Per Serving = Total ingredient cost for one portionAdd up every ingredient that goes into a dish, priced to the gram. If a burger uses £0.90 in beef, £0.25 in a bun, £0.15 in sauces and £0.30 in sides, your cost per serving is £1.60.
This is where the Chef-Ops-Pro Recipe Costing Workbook earns its place. Running these calculations manually for an entire menu is the kind of task that gets put off indefinitely. Do it once properly, and you have a reference you can actually use.
Using Cost Per Serving to Set Menu Prices
Once you know what a dish costs to make, you can price it with intention rather than instinct.
Menu Price = Cost Per Serving ÷ Target Food Cost %If your cost per serving is £4.40 and you’re targeting 30% food cost:
£4.40 ÷ 0.30 = £14.67Round up to £14.95 or £15.00. You now have a price that works mathematically, not just one that felt about right when you wrote the menu.
The target percentage isn’t fixed. Higher-margin dishes — pasta, vegetarian, bread-based — can afford a lower food cost percentage than a prime cut of beef. Blending your menu across different food cost percentages is how you hit an overall target without pricing yourself off the high street.
What a Good Food Cost Looks Like
There is no single right answer, but here are the benchmarks worth knowing:
| Operation type | Target food cost |
|---|---|
| Fine dining | 25–35% |
| Casual dining / brasserie | 28–35% |
| Fast casual | 25–30% |
| Events / contract catering | 30–38% |
| Pub food | 30–35% |
Events and contract catering tend to sit higher because the model includes venue costs and staffing that reduce the margin pressure on food alone. If you’re running both a kitchen and a catering arm, track them separately — blending the two will mask where the problems are.
Tracking It Month by Month
A one-off calculation is useful. Monthly tracking is what actually changes behaviour.
The Annual Food Cost Spreadsheet gives you a free template to run this across a full year, so you can see seasonal patterns, catch drift before it becomes a problem, and have something defensible to show an investor or a bank.
If you’re on Chef-Ops-Pro, the Food Cost Tracking module handles this inside the platform — monthly entries against targets, outlet by outlet if you’re running multiple sites, with YTD reporting built in. The number you need is always there when you need it.
Why the Number Goes Wrong
If your food cost is higher than it should be, the cause is almost always one of these:
Over-ordering. Stock that sits too long gets wasted, written off, or “helped along” by staff. The Procurement module tracks your ordering pattern so you can see what you’re buying against what you’re selling.
Portion drift. Plates get heavier over time, especially when there’s no consistent check. Cost per serving calculations only hold if the portion is consistent. Weigh. Check. Enforce.
Menu complexity. More dishes means more ingredients, more waste from short shelf-life items, and more opportunity for things to go wrong. A tighter menu with ingredient crossover — where the same items appear across multiple dishes — reduces waste and buying cost simultaneously.
No supplier discipline. Prices change constantly. A supplier invoice that looked fine six months ago may now be eating into margin you’ve already committed elsewhere. Negotiate regularly, and don’t assume the price you agreed is the price you’re still getting.
The Bigger Picture
Food cost is one number. It connects to everything else — your stock ordering, your portion control, your menu design, your supplier relationships, and ultimately your EHO-ready compliance reporting.
Kitchens that track food cost properly don’t just save money. They make better decisions — about what stays on the menu, which suppliers to push back on, and where the real inefficiencies are hiding.
The formula is simple. The discipline is the hard part. Start with the numbers, and the rest follows.
