Menu cost calculator

What plate cost has to include

Everything the plate consumes, not everything on the recipe card. The protein and the starch are never the problem; the oil, the marinade, the garnish and the two sauces are where a dish quietly loses two dirhams, and for anything that leaves the building the box, the lid, the bag and the cutlery belong in the same total. Leaving packaging out is what makes a delivery menu look healthy on paper while the month does not.

Buy in the unit you cost in. A kilo price against a gram quantity is the single most common error in plate costing, and it is off by a thousand rather than a little, so it never looks like a rounding problem - it looks like a dish that is impossibly cheap or impossibly expensive. That is why the calculator prints each line as you typed it.

One thing it deliberately does not include: waste and yield. A whole chicken is not 1.0 kg of usable chicken, and a case of lettuce is not a case of leaves. If you are costing from a raw purchase price, put the yield into the quantity - 0.24 kg of trimmed weight rather than 0.18 kg - or the plate will read cheaper than it is every time.

Food cost percentage, and the VAT trap

The plate cost divided by the selling price. The number that matters is calculated on the NET price, before VAT, because the VAT is not yours - it is collected and handed on. Divide by a VAT-inclusive price and the percentage comes out lower by exactly the VAT rate: a plate genuinely running at 36% reads as 34% and passes the review it should have failed. It is a quiet error because both numbers look plausible.

Why 35%

Because it is where the rest of the business usually stops fitting. Roughly a third of the price to food, a third to labour and rent, and what is left is the reason to open at all - the arithmetic is crude, and it is crude in the same way for most kitchens, which is why the number has stuck.

It does not fit everyone and you should know which side you are on. A steakhouse or a seafood restaurant runs above 35% on purpose, because the money is the cash margin on a high-priced plate rather than the percentage. A coffee bar runs at 20% and still struggles, because its rent and its staff are proportionally enormous next to a bag of beans. Percentages pay no bills; cash does. A 45% plate at 90 dirhams leaves more in the till than a 25% plate at 20.

Pricing from the target: divide, never multiply

To hit a 30% food cost you divide the plate cost by 0.30, which is the same as multiplying by 3.33. Multiplying by 1.3 is the mistake that gets made, and it is not a small one: a plate costing 10 prices at 13.00 instead of 33.33, landing at 77% food cost. Then round up rather than to the nearest, because rounding down puts the plate back across the line it was raised to clear.

The number that actually moves

Plate cost is not a fact, it is a photograph. Chicken moves, oil moves, and the packaging supplier changes the case price without mentioning it. A dish costed in January and never looked at again is the normal way a menu drifts to 40% while everyone is watching the covers instead. Re-cost the ten dishes that sell most, twice a year, and you will have found more money than a price rise would have raised.

The other half is knowing which ten those are. That is what a menu that takes its own orders gives you - every line item counted, the popular dish and the profitable one visible as different things, and the price you changed four minutes ago being the price the next customer pays. That is Get Menu: your own ordering page, 0% commission, a flat monthly price, and a 15-day trial with no card. See what it costs.