How to Calculate
Restaurant Food Cost %.

You know your food cost percentage feels too high. What you probably don't know is which dishes are actually dragging it there — because the menu hasn't been fully recosted since the day it launched.

The formula itself is simple: food cost % = (ingredient cost ÷ menu price) × 100. Cost a dish at £4.20 to plate and sell it at £16.50, and you're running at 25.5% on that item — comfortably inside a typical 28–32% target for an independent kitchen. The problem is that almost nobody applies that formula to every dish, every time a supplier price moves.

Here's what drift looks like on a real menu. Take a kitchen turning over £850,000 a year, targeting a 30% food cost. If the actual blended cost has crept to 34% — a few supplier price rises nobody re-costed, a couple of dishes over-portioned since launch — that's £34,000 a year walking out the door on food alone, before waste, before labour, before anything else goes wrong.

A menu costed once at launch isn't costed. It's a guess with good intentions.

Why spreadsheets go stale

A costing spreadsheet is accurate for exactly as long as ingredient prices stay still — which is never. Supplier prices move weekly, portion sizes drift in service, and specials get costed on the back of a delivery note and never revisited. Generic recipe-costing apps aren't much better: they cost a dish once, but don't connect that cost to what's actually selling.

What matters isn't just food cost percentage on paper. It's gross profit at dish level, mapped against your actual sales mix — so you know whether your best-seller is quietly the worst earner on the menu.

Where Chef's Intelligence fits

The Menu & Product Dev zone of Chef's Intelligence — Axom AI's plugin suite for Claude — costs every dish and spec against live supplier pricing, so recosting isn't a once-a-year project. Financial Clarity tracks GP at dish level against your actual sales mix, and rolls it into P&L and cash flow reporting you can actually read.

Together, they tell you not just what a dish costs — but whether it's earning its place on the menu.