Calculate food cost percentage for restaurants and food businesses. Work out profit margins per dish.
This food cost calculator helps cafés, restaurants and home cooks work out the cost and profit margin of a dish. Enter the ingredient cost, your menu or sale price and labour per dish, and it shows the food cost percentage and gross profit. Keeping food cost in a healthy range is key to running a profitable kitchen.
This is general business information only, not financial advice. Most hospitality businesses aim for a food cost of around 28–35% of the menu price, but the right target depends on your venue, overheads and pricing.
Food cost percentage is one of the core numbers in any hospitality business: it tells you what share of a dish's selling price is eaten up by its ingredients. This calculator works it out from your ingredient cost and menu price, so café, restaurant and food-truck operators can check whether a dish is actually profitable before it goes on the menu.
In the Australian industry, most venues aim for a food cost percentage somewhere between 25 and 35 percent, depending on the format — quick-service and high-volume venues often run lower, while premium restaurants tolerate higher food cost on signature dishes. If a dish comes out well above your target, the options are to re-price it, re-portion it, or rework the recipe with cheaper components.
You can also use the calculator in reverse when building a menu: decide your target percentage, cost the recipe accurately (including waste and trim, not just the raw invoice price), and the implied menu price follows. Remember to work with GST-exclusive figures, since the GST you collect on sales is passed on to the ATO rather than kept as revenue.