Learn how to calculate food costs correctly and improve your bottom line by avoiding common mistakes and pricing your meals better.
Calculating food costs is a fundamental best practice for any restaurant. Knowing your food costs can inform your decisions when it comes to pricing your menu items and budgeting for ingredients and vendors which when done right, will lead to higher profits.
That's why it's important that you get food costs calculations right.
In this post, you'll learn the ins and outs of calculating your food costs. We'll shed light on the different components that you should measure, the formulas for calculating your costs, and how to put your data to good use.
Let's get started.
What are food costs?
Food cost is the ratio between the cost of your raw materials/ingredients and the revenue that you generate when you sell your menu items.
There are a number of ways to calculate food costs in a restaurant. Some choose to itemize the cost of each ingredient in a dish to determine their food cost per serving.
Others calculate it using their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), which takes into account the value of your inventory at a given time, and shows the cost of food in a specific time period. This method allows you to figure out your ideal food cost percentage, so you can have a clearer picture of how much it costs you to make your dishes.
That's why it's important that you get food costs calculations right. You'll need a starting point to help you understand your restaurant better, and make informed decisions for the future.
Now let’s talk about how to calculate food cost percentage data and the cost percentage formula in more detail:
2 ways to calculate food cost percentage in a restaurant
Let's look at these two food cost percentage calculations more closely below.
Calculate your food cost per serving to optimize your menu prices
One way to calculate your menu prices and calculate actual food cost of your items is by itemizing and measuring the ingredients you use per dish. So, if you're a pizzeria and you're calculating how much it costs to make one pizza, your food cost per serving calculation can look like this:
Dough = $0.45 Cheese = $1.99 Sauce = $0.44 Mushrooms = $0.40 Olives = $0.15 Pepperoni = $1.00 Total = $4.43 With this method, it shows that ingredient costs are $4.43 to make one pizza dish. From there you can calculate your margins based on your food cost percentages and figure out how to set your menu prices for each product to be profitable.
It's easy to calculate food cost and optimize menu prices once you have your total ingredient costs.
The ideal food cost percentage formula is: take your total ingredient cost and divide it by your ideal food cost percentage.
$4.43 / 0.30 (or your ideal food cost percentage) = $14.77
With the actual food cost formula and your ingredient costs, it's really easy to get all the answers you need.
How to calculate your food cost percentage to optimize menu prices
Another method to calculate food cost percentage is to use the actual food cost percentage formula, which gives you the ratio of food costs to revenue, expressed as a percentage. The food cost formula for that is:
The Food cost percentage formula is = (Beginning Inventory value(Food Supplies) + Purchase Cost – Ending Inventory) ÷ Total Food Sales So let's say that in a given month, your restaurant's inventory was valued at $10,000. Your purchase cost of additional food supplies was $2,000, and by the end of the month, your inventory was worth $8,000.
In that same time period, you made $12,000 in total food sales.
If you calculate food cost percentage, it would like this:
Your food cost percentage based on the food cost formula above is 33%, which means for every dollar you make, you're spending 33 cents in food for each menu item.
Benchmarking your ideal food cost percentage
According to Restaurant Report , profitable restaurants usually have an ideal food cost percentage of 28% to 35%, so if your actual food cost percentage is above that range, it could mean that you're spending too much on ingredients, your menu prices are too low, or that you're not generating enough total food sales.
In the example above, we see that the restaurant's ideal food cost percentage is 33%, so they're right in the average range.
It's important to note that the ideal food cost formula only represents your real food cost, and doesn't factor in other business expenses. When you include labor costs, Restaurant Report estimates that your expenses will consume 50% to 75% of sales. And when you add in things like overhead expenses, utilities, and rent, you'll find that your restaurant costs will eat up a sizable chunk of your revenue.
The restaurant industry average data shows that the average restaurant profit margins sit at between 3% and 9%. Full-service restaurants have their average margins between 3% and 5%, while food trucks and fast food establishments have a profit margin between 6% and 9%. Meanwhile, caterers see margins between 7% and 8%.
Why should you calculate your food costs?
Now that you know the basics of food costing, let's look at the benefits of tracking this metric closely.
It shows you how your business is doing
For starters, your ideal food cost percentage can serve as a handy benchmarking tool. As discussed above, restaurants, on average, have a food cost percentage of 28% to 35%. Depending on how your numbers are tracking, you can get a solid idea of how your business is performing compared to others.
A restaurant's food cost percentage can also be a helpful indicator of whether you're over or underestimating your margins. For many restaurants, the more accurate their estimate is for what it costs them to serve each dish on the menu, the better off they'll be in terms of profits.
It sheds light on areas of improvement
Knowing your real food cost percentage can also give restaurant owners ideas on how to improve your restaurant business. If your total food costs are higher than average, then you could look into your budget and spending, then find ways to lower costs and implement food cost control at your venue. You could, for example, switch to a different vendor, re-negotiate your terms or look at your portion sizes for every menu item.
If your food cost control isn't the problem, then it may be a case of driving food sales, in which case you can cook up ways to increase foot traffic or average dollar value. In some cases, it's an issue of pricing, and your sales prices are undervalued. (More on this below.) The bottom line is, the only way to surface these issues and ultimately solve them is to know your numbers.
It informs your sales price on your menu
A restaurant owner can't properly calculate your menu pricing without knowing your food costs. Generally speaking, restaurants calculate their menu items using the formula Cost per serving ÷ Ideal food cost percentage. In the examples above, the restaurant industry has a cost per serving of 4.43 and a good food cost percentage of 33%. This translates to:
So, the actual food cost per serving of 4.43 and a target food cost percentage of 33%, the restaurant chooses to price this burger $13.42 (or they could round up to $13.50.) As you can see, having a proper food cost percentage is an important component of menu pricing, which is why it's essential to get an accurate view of how much your ideal food costs are.
How often should you run your food cost calculation?
Every restaurant is different, so the decision on when and how often to calculate your food costs depends on your operations. That said, Restaurant Report recommends calculating it during a specific accounting period of at least two weeks or every 28 days. With an inventory software such as WISK it can be automatically calculated when you receive your items every week.
Common mistakes when calculating food costs
Already calculating your food costs? Here's a quick rundown of the common mistakes restaurants make and how to avoid them.
Not calculating your food costs regularly
Food cost calculation isn't a “one a done” activity. This is a metric that needs to be tracked on a continuous basis. After all, the F&B industry doesn't stay stagnant; it's constantly going through menu price changes, new regulations, and trends so your menu price needs to reflect the market.
Make it a point to calculate food costs regularly (at least once a month, but let's be honest. Ideally it should be done automatically week to week.) and then track your data over time. This will allow you to spot trends and see whether your metrics are improving (or not) in the short- and long-term.
Not doing anything with the data
Data in and of itself isn't very useful. The real value lies in the insights and action you take based on the information you've gathered.
As such, measuring your food costs percentage isn't enough. See to it that you're actually doing something with that data.
For instance, if your actual food cost is trending up, then you may need to re-examine your budget, reduce recipe costs, or update your menu price. If your food cost ratio is going down, then you could find ways to further optimize it or consider reinvesting in other areas of the business.
Whatever the case, strive to take action on your data when necessary. Knowing your numbers is all well and good, but you won't improve your business by just passively monitoring your data.
Don't do things manually. Technology exists for a reason.
Another big mistake is sticking to manual processes. If you're still counting and itemizing ingredients and costs by hand, you're not only wasting time, you're also more prone to human errors, discrepancies, and potentially introducing food waste in your venue.
Address all that by arming your business with tools to automate and streamline how you track and record your costs. Consider investing in solutions like:
A restaurant POS system. A POS system enables you to ring up sales at your restaurant. These sales and transactions are recorded, so you can effectively track your revenues. In many cases, the POS solution is tightly integrated with the business' inventory and overall restaurant management platform, so sales and inventory levels are tracked and adjusted from one system.
An inventory counting app. Physically counting your food items and ingredients is important in ensuring that the numbers you have in your system reflect what you have in the kitchen. As such, you'll want to arm yourself with a robust stock counting app that lets you count and record food quantities, costs with ease. A good inventory app also lets you track waste and spoilage For best results, use a solution that works on your mobile device, so you can eliminate the need for manual tools like pen and paper.
A good restaurant inventory app can also keep track of your orders and food supply. As soon as you receive your orders, your just enter them in your food inventory app and it will calculate and update every cost as needed.
Receiving an order in your kitchen should only take a few seconds, which makes it easy for you to identify and manage any potential shortages or if the ingredients need to be returned due to not matching your quality standards.
Your food inventory app might also help you track how much money is being spent on each ingredient and the total cost of ingredients of that are used during a certain time period or day. How many days worth of raw materials do I have left? How much did my food cost on a monthly basis? These questions become easier to answer with detailed tracking data at hand.
Once you've got numbers flowing through your system, you can calculate what percentage of the menu items are costing more than they're selling for - either too little or too much per dish. This will give you insights into pricing decisions that need adjustments.
Restaurant analytics, why crunch the numbers by hand when you can have a trusty analytics app to do it for you? Most solutions can automatically track everything from inventory costs, COGS, sales, profits, recipes, actual food costs, and more, so you can focus less on running the numbers and devote more energy to strategizing and taking action.
Restaurant food costs calculator. If your restaurant management system doesn't have a built in recipe cost calculator, there are a number of free ones online. With these tools, you can simply enter your inventory and sales data, and the calculators will do the rest.
WISK includes a built-in food cost calculator to help you with menu engineering. As soon as you receive items, enter your costs manually and WISK updates all of your batches, sub-recipes, and recipes. It also compares the prices in the POS system to your plate cost in order to notify you if they changed so that you are not over or under because the ingredient cost changed.
Invoices can be time consuming and tedious to enter manually, so we automatically extract line-item data for you. This means that all the information is updated in minutes instead of hours, which then guarantees what's important: accurate data and maintaining a profitable restaurant!
Final words
Plate costing is and will always be a critical metric in restaurant management. You should keep a close eye on it for as long as your business is running. Doing so will help you stay competitive and be more profitable.
See your ROI thrive as you put the insights from this comprehensive guide to work in calculating food costs. Your dedication to financial precision guarantees a brighter future for your restaurant.
If you're planning to open up your own local restaurant, you must read this article!
.svg)