Food cost

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

In Kitchen → Food cost, each dish shows:

• Cost — the sum of its recipe at current stock prices (ex-VAT).
• Price — its selling price.
• Food cost % — cost ÷ price. Lower is better; most kitchens aim for ~25–35%.
• Margin — what's left after the cost.

Set a target food-cost %; dishes above it are flagged so you can re-price, re-portion, or swap an ingredient.

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 tab, 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.