Free tool
Food cost calculator
Enter your ingredients, your menu price, and the food cost percentage you want to hit. Get your actual dish cost, your current margin, and the suggested price in real time. No email required.
Live result
Suggested price
To hit a 30% food cost
$4.20
Your food cost is below 22%. Make sure you are not undercosting ingredients.
This is one dish.
Corbez does this math for your entire menu, automatically, every time your supplier price changes. Then it tells you which campaign to run.
Start freeHow to use food cost percentage
Food cost percentage is your dish cost divided by your menu price. It is the single most important number in independent restaurant operations. Most casual-dining operators target 28 to 32 percent. Pizzerias and QSRs often target lower (22 to 28 percent) because labor and overhead are higher relative to ingredient cost. Fine dining can run 32 to 38 percent because the menu price absorbs it.
The problem with calculating food cost once a year is that supplier prices move every week. A dish that was at 30 percent in April can drift to 34 percent by August without anyone noticing. The restaurants that catch that drift inside a week recover two to four points of margin per year that their competitors leave on the table.
Use this calculator for one-off dish costing and menu-pricing decisions. For continuous cost tracking across every supplier invoice, every week, every menu item, the manual approach does not scale. Corbez automates it.
What this calculator does not do
- Track week-over-week supplier price changes on each ingredient.
- Alert you when a cost drop opens a campaign opportunity on DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub.
- Benchmark your supplier pricing against other independents in your region.
- Store your invoice history or run month-over-month trend reports.
All four of those are what Corbez does automatically. If you find yourself opening this calculator more than twice a month, it is time to put the whole workflow on autopilot.