Recipe Cost Calculator
Add your ingredients the way you actually buy them — case price and case size — and say how much the recipe uses. You get the batch cost, the cost per serving, and your food cost percentage.
Add your ingredients the way you actually buy them — case price and case size — and say how much the recipe uses. You get the batch cost, the cost per serving, and your food cost percentage.
Fill in a pack price, pack size, and amount used for at least one ingredient. Use any unit you like — just keep pack size and amount used in the same one.
Every ingredient line is the same three-step move: pack price ÷ pack size × amount used. The unit doesn't matter — pounds, ounces, grams, each — as long as the pack size and the amount used are in the same one.
A 40 lb case of chicken breast costs $42.00, so a pound costs $1.05. The recipe uses half a pound: 42 ÷ 40 × 0.5 = $0.53. Repeat for the bun, the sauce, the garnish, the oil. Add them up and you have the batch cost.
Trim loss. A pound purchased is not a pound served. Whole produce and bone-in proteins lose 20–50% before they reach the plate, and if you cost with the invoice price you never see it. Work out the real number with the yield calculator and use that as your pack price.
The quiet ingredients. Fry oil, the splash of cream, the pickle, the to-go clamshell. Each is pennies; together they are a point or two of food cost that never shows up in a spreadsheet.
Drift. This is the big one. Costing a recipe is a twenty-minute job; costing it againevery time a price moves is the job nobody does. That's the gap that turns a 29% menu into a 34% menu without a single recipe changing.
One recipe by hand is fine. Forty recipes, re-costed every delivery, is not a spreadsheet job — it's why costing software exists. Freecost is free, reads your invoice from a phone photo, and pushes the new prices through every recipe that uses the ingredient. See also how to cost a recipe and the food cost percentage calculator.
Cost each ingredient separately, then add them up. For one ingredient: divide the pack price by the pack size to get a unit price, then multiply by the amount the recipe uses. A $42 case of 40 lb chicken is $1.05/lb; a recipe using 0.5 lb costs $0.53. Add every line together for the batch cost, then divide by servings for the cost per plate.
Recipe cost is a dollar amount — what the ingredients for one dish or one batch cost you. Food cost percentage is that dollar amount divided by the menu price, times 100. You need the recipe cost first; the percentage tells you whether the price you charge is healthy.
Yes, or your numbers run optimistic. If you buy 10 lb of broccoli and 3.9 lb ends up in the bin, the 6.1 lb you actually serve carries the cost of all 10. Either enter your yield-adjusted price as the pack price, or work out the true cost per usable pound with a yield calculator first.
Every time your ingredient prices move, which for most broadline deliveries means weekly. A recipe costed once and left alone drifts quietly — proteins, dairy, and oil can move 10–20% in a season, and nothing on your menu tells you it happened.
Yes — Freecost is free recipe costing software for restaurants, on web and Android. This calculator does one recipe at a time by hand; the app keeps every recipe costed against your live ingredient prices and updates them from a photo of your delivery invoice.
This costs one recipe, once. Freecost costs your whole menu continuously — snap the delivery invoice and every affected dish re-costs itself.
Start free — no credit cardFreecost is free recipe-costing software built by a chef. Web + Android.