Menu Price Calculator
Know what a dish costs to make? Enter it with your target food cost percentage and get the price you should be charging — plus what the same plate looks like at 25%, 30%, and 35%.
Know what a dish costs to make? Enter it with your target food cost percentage and get the price you should be charging — plus what the same plate looks like at 25%, 30%, and 35%.
Enter your plate cost and a target percentage to see a suggested price.
Menu price = plate cost ÷ (target food cost % ÷ 100)
It's the food-cost formula run backwards: instead of asking “what percentage am I at?”, you pick the percentage and let it tell you the price.
Your fish tacos cost $3.90 a plate and you want 30% food cost: 3.90 ÷ 0.30 = $13.00. At 25% they'd need to be $15.60; at 35% you could charge $11.14.
Labor. A hand-rolled agnolotti and a poured soup can have the same plate cost. Price the labor-heavy dish at a lower food-cost percentage so the margin covers the hands.
The market. The formula might say your burger should be $19 — but if every burger on your street is $14, the formula loses. Fix it from the cost side (portion, sourcing, build) rather than pricing yourself out of the neighborhood.
Drift.The price you computed today is built on today's ingredient costs. When your cheese goes up 15% in April, this dish quietly slides from 30% to 34% — and nobody re-runs the math until the P&L hurts.
Menu price = plate cost ÷ (target food cost % ÷ 100). If a dish costs $4.20 and you want 30% food cost: 4.20 ÷ 0.30 = $14.00.
Most full-service restaurants price dishes to land between 28% and 35% food cost. Price high-labor dishes toward the low end (the percentage has to cover the work) and low-labor, high-volume dishes can tolerate the high end.
No — menus are portfolios. A high-cost ribeye at 38% can still be your most profitable item in dollars, while a 22% pasta subsidizes it. What matters is the blended food cost across what actually sells.
Pricing psychology: $13.86 reads as fussy and calculated; $13.95 or $14 reads as a price. Compute the exact number from your target, then round to a menu-friendly figure — up, when in doubt.
Freecost recalculates every menu price target automatically when your ingredient prices move — so April's cheese spike shows up in April, not on the quarterly P&L.
Start free — no credit cardFreecost is free recipe-costing software built by a chef. Web + Android.