I build small food-cost spreadsheets for restaurant menus. They are plain Excel: no macros, no add-ins, just formulas you can read and check. This post walks through the method so you can build the same thing yourself. At the end I mention where a ready-made version fits, if you would rather not start from a blank file.
The three numbers that matter
Every menu pricing decision comes down to three numbers:
- Dish cost: what the ingredients in one plate cost you.
- Food-cost %: dish cost divided by the menu price.
- Target price: the price you need to charge so food cost lands on your target percentage.
Most owners know the first one roughly and guess the other two. A sheet makes all three explicit.
Step 1: Ingredient master list with unit prices
Keep one row per ingredient with these columns:
- Ingredient name
- Purchase unit (kg, L, piece)
- Price paid (what you actually paid for the pack)
- Pack quantity in the recipe unit (for example, 1000 g)
- Unit price = price paid divided by pack quantity
If price paid is in column C and pack quantity is in column E, the unit price formula is:
=C2/E2
Example: a 1,000 g pack of boneless chicken thigh costs 180 EGP. The unit price is 180 / 1000 = 0.18 EGP per gram.
Keep every price in the recipe unit (grams, millilitres, pieces). Mixing kilograms in the price column with grams in the recipe is the most common source of wrong costs.
Step 2: Recipe lines with waste
Each dish is a list of lines: ingredient, quantity on the plate, and waste %. Waste is the share of what you buy that you lose to trimming, peeling or cutting. It is not the same as the quantity on the plate.
The line cost formula is:
line cost = quantity x unit price / (1 - waste %)
The division matters. If you buy 1,000 g of chicken and lose 20% to trimming, you have only 800 g of usable meat. So 180 g on the plate does not cost 180 x 0.18 = 32.40 EGP. It costs 32.40 / 0.80 = 40.50 EGP.
Worked example for one dish (all numbers are illustrative):
| Ingredient | Plate qty | Unit price (EGP) | Waste | Line cost (EGP) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken thigh | 180 g | 0.18 | 20% | 40.50 |
| Rice | 150 g | 0.03 | 0% | 4.50 |
| Garlic sauce | 60 ml | 0.10 | 0% | 6.00 |
| Dish cost | 51.00 |
Dish cost is the sum of its line costs. In the sheet, that is a SUMIF over the recipe table, matched on dish name, so adding a new line updates the dish automatically.
Step 3: Food-cost % and margin
Food-cost % tells you what share of the price goes to ingredients:
food-cost % = dish cost / menu price
If this plate sells for 150 EGP, food cost is 51 / 150 = 34%. The gross margin in money is 150 - 51 = 99 EGP per plate, which is 66% of the price.
Whether 34% is acceptable depends on your target. Set the target from your own rent, labour and other costs, not from a number you read in a blog post.
Step 4: The target price formula
Turn the target around to get the price you should charge:
suggested price = dish cost / target food-cost %
With a 30% target: 51 / 0.30 = 170 EGP. Then round to a price that is easy to print on a menu. In my sheet I use CEILING to the nearest 5 EGP, so 170 stays 170 and 171 becomes 175.
Now compare with what you charge today:
- Current price 150 EGP gives 34% food cost, above a 30% target. Either raise the price toward 170, or reduce the sauce portion.
- Current price 180 EGP gives 28% food cost, under the target.
The formula gives you a starting point. The final decision also depends on what customers will pay nearby.
Step 5: Check the whole menu
Once every dish has a recipe, the useful view is across the whole menu. Which dishes carry the margin? Which are priced below target? Which sell often but earn little? To get a weighted margin, multiply each dish's margin per plate by its monthly sales count, add the results up, and divide by total plates sold.
Mistakes I see most often
- Stale prices. A cost sheet is only as current as its last price update. Review the master list whenever a supplier changes a price.
- Waste counted twice. Use waste % for trimming and prep losses. Do not add cooking loss on top unless you have measured it.
- Mixed units. Keep recipe units consistent with purchase units. Conversion errors hide in totals and are hard to spot later.
- Treating example numbers as benchmarks. The numbers in this article are examples to show the arithmetic, not targets.
The ready-made version
If you do not want to build this from scratch, I sell the English edition as a single Excel file. It has an ingredient master list with yield and waste, a recipe-cost sheet, a menu-pricing tab with target food-cost %, room for 60 recipes and 600 ingredient lines, and formulas only, with no macros.
Get it here: https://karimverse6102.gumroad.com/l/toksvv
I also publish MENA price-data scrapers on Apify, covering things like grocery prices and currency rates. If you want to pull supplier or market prices into a sheet like this automatically, you can see the actors at https://apify.com/alfhar.
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