Food Cost Percentage: The Formula, With Real Examples
Food cost percentage is the fraction of a dish's selling price that you spent putting food on the plate. One formula, memorize it:
Food cost % = (plate cost ÷ menu price) × 100
A worked example
A chicken sandwich: $1.85 chicken, $0.55 bun, $0.40 sauce and pickles, $0.90 fries. Plate cost $3.70, menu price $12.95: 3.70 ÷ 12.95 × 100 = 28.6%. Every sandwich leaves $9.25 of gross profit to pay for labor, rent, and the lights.
What's a good number?
- Quick service: 25–30%
- Full service: 28–35%
- Steak and seafood houses: 35–40% (offset by higher tickets)
- Bars (drinks): 18–24% pour cost
Concepts differ because the percentage only tells half the story — a 38% ribeye that leaves $22 on the table beats a 25% side salad that leaves $6. You bank dollars, not percentages. The percentage is a guardrail that tells you when something drifted.
The three mistakes that break the math
1. Costing with invoice prices instead of yield-adjusted prices. You trim, peel, and cook away part of everything you buy. If broccoli yields 61%, the $2.00/lb on the invoice is really $3.28/lb on the plate. Skip this and every produce- and protein-heavy dish reads healthier than it is. (Run yours through the yield calculator.)
2. Costing once and never again. A dish costed in January is fiction by June — cheese moves, chicken moves, oil moves. The formula is only as good as the prices inside it.
3. Forgetting the quiet ingredients.Fry oil, garnishes, the splash of cream, to-go packaging if it ships with the dish. Individually they're pennies; across a menu they're a point or two of food cost.
Try your own numbers in the free food cost calculator — or let Freecost keep every dish costed continuously against your live prices.