Food cost

Open the corresponding Foody workspace described below.

What Is It?

Food cost tells you what each dish costs you to make and how much margin it leaves — computed automatically from its recipe and your stock prices. It's how you find the dishes quietly eating your profit.

How It Works (Simply)

The number comes straight from the chain you already set up:

Stock prices  ─┐
               ├─→  Recipe (ingredients + preparations × quantities)  ─→  Dish cost  ─→  Margin vs its price
Prep costs    ─┘

So a dish only has a food cost once it has a recipe. No recipe = no cost (and the dish shows as un-costed).

What you see

Under Kitchen → Food Cost, inspect ingredient cost excluding VAT, selling price, cost percentage and margin for priced dishes. The chart has a 35% reference line; this is not an editable target on this page. Use search, status filter and sorting to inspect dishes. Missing recipe quantities or reliable costs prevent a reliable comparison.

How to use it

• Sort by food cost % to find your worst offenders first.
• A dish costs too much? Adjust its portion or ingredients on the Recipe and cost section, change its price, or substitute a cheaper ingredient.
• Prices changed? Update the ingredient in Stock; every dish using it re-costs automatically.

Theoretical vs actual

The Food cost page is your theoretical cost — what each dish should cost. To compare it against what you actually used (waste, over-portioning, errors), close the day in Daily operations; the variance is where money leaks. For an item tracked by a shared counter whose rule shows the remaining count, the cart accounts for available quantity even above the low-stock threshold. That threshold controls the warning, not the cart cap. See Availability to check the rule and manual overrides.

Sale allowance is separate from recipe cost

Predefined item stocks now have a journal under Items & menus → Stock history and on each product. A rotating carte can prepare initial allowances per series and publish them without restoring already committed units. Previous remaining counts are not carried forward. Order changes and pre-production releases use the original frozen pool; a produced item remains consumed. Ingredient/preparation quantities and recipe costs remain separate. See Availability for initial imports, corrections and history filters.