Yield Percentage: Why Your Broccoli Costs More Than You Think

Here's a true story from a Freecost kitchen: a smoothie shop owner entered broccoli's yield as 0.9, meaning 90%. The software read it as 0.9% — and priced her broccoli at $209 a pound. The bug got fixed the same day, but it's the perfect introduction to yield, because the whole concept is about one question: how much of what you buy actually reaches the plate?

The definition

Yield % = (usable weight ÷ purchased weight) × 100

Buy a 10 lb case of broccoli crowns, trim it into 6.1 lb of florets, and your yield is 61%. The other 39% went in the compost — but you paid for all of it.

Why it changes your costs

True cost per usable lb = invoice price ÷ (yield% ÷ 100)

That $2.00/lb broccoli at 61% yield really costs $3.28/lb served — 64% more than the invoice says. Whole chickens at 55% meat yield nearly double their per-pound cost. Every recipe costed at invoice prices understates reality, and the gap compounds silently across the menu.

How to run a yield test

1. Weigh the product as purchased (whole case or piece).
2. Prep it to your spec — trim, peel, portion, cook if the recipe uses cooked weight.
3. Weigh the usable result.
4. Divide, multiply by 100, write it down where your costing lives.

Do it once per high-volume ingredient, redo it when you change vendor or spec. Published charts (we keep one on the yield calculatorpage) are decent starting points, but your knife skills and your vendor's trim are the real numbers.

One convention to agree on

Yield is written as a percentage: 90 means 90%. Not 0.9. Pick the convention, put it on the costing sheet, and — if you build software — guard the input. We learned that one from Paula's broccoli.