If your food cost percentage is going up, do not jump straight to raising the selling price. You usually need to check more places first.
1. Supplier price changes
If cheese goes up 12% and you do not update the recipe, the costing politely lies.
2. Wrong quantities in the recipe
If the recipe says 120g but the kitchen actually uses 150g, the actual food cost is different.
3. Waste and yield
You buy 1 kilo of product, but you do not always use 1 kilo. Trimming, bones, peels, burnt food, and production mistakes change the real cost.
Example:
- You buy 1kg of an ingredient at €10
- After trimming, 80% remains as usable product (yield)
Actual cost per kg of usable product = 10 / 0.80 = €12.50
4. Weak portioning standards
At first the plate has 120g of potatoes. Two months later it has “however much the ladle scoops”. The ladle, unfortunately, does not do cost control.
5. Bad inventory
If the stock count is wrong, the period food cost will be wrong. Formulas that use opening stock, purchases, and closing stock depend on accurate records. See Theoretical vs Actual Food Cost.
6. Delivery commissions and net sales
If a dish sells for €12.00 but after a 25% platform commission you are left with €9.00 net revenue before other costs, then a food cost of €3.20 is not 26.7% of €12.00. It is:
3.20 / 9.00 × 100 = 35.6%
This is an example to show the logic — not a general rule for every platform or every contract.
7. Menu mix
If you sell a lot of a low-margin dish and little of a high-margin dish, the overall result can be worse than the “average” food cost suggests. For choosing what to sell, see Menu engineering.
How to lower food cost without hurting quality
The goal is not to cut ingredients blindly. The goal is to reduce mistakes, waste, and bad pricing.
- Cost the core dishes first. If you do not have time for the whole menu, start with the dishes that sell the most.
- Keep ingredient prices up to date. If the supplier price changes, the costing must change too. Apps like CostoMenu update prices across all recipes automatically.
- Check portions. Use standards, not “by eye”. The eye is a good cook, but a bad accountant.
- Compare actual vs theoretical food cost. The gap should stay within a reasonable range — see Theoretical vs Actual food cost.
- Do not cut quality blindly. If an ingredient is why the guest comes back, changing it can cost more than it “saves”. Find waste and wrong processes first. Then touch the product.
- Look at the menu as a whole. Food cost is tied directly to menu engineering: which dishes are popular, which have a good margin, and which need a change in price, portion, or placement.
Mini checklist for a weekly review
- Which ingredients went up the most in price?
- Which dishes sell the most?
- Have the recipes been updated with the new prices?
- Is there a gap between theoretical and actual food cost?
- Which dishes have a high food cost but a low selling price?
- Where is there waste that is not recorded?
- Are there delivery dishes that look profitable only because we look at the menu price and not the net selling price?
- Which dishes need to be re-weighed in practice?
For the basics of the calculation, start with Food Cost: Formula & Examples.