Recipe Cost Calculator

What a dish costs per serving, worked out from what you actually paid — including the pack-size conversion and the trim you throw away. Download it as an Excel file whose formulas still work, so next month you type in the new price instead of starting again.

Ingredients

Enter what you paid for the pack, then how much the recipe uses. Yield % is how much of what you buy survives peeling, trimming or boning — 100% if nothing is lost.

Ingredient Pack pricePack sizeUnit Recipe usesUnit Yield % Remove

Food cost % is cost ÷ menu price. Many kitchens aim for 25–35%; your own target is the one that matters.

Cost

Per serving
Whole batch
Menu price at target
Gross margin
per serving, before labour and overhead
IngredientBuyCostShare
Live formulas — change a price and every figure updates.

What this does that a calculator does not

It converts pack sizes properly. You buy a 5 lb bag and use 250 g. The conversions here use exact definitions — one pound is 453.59237 g, one US cup is 236.588 mL.

It refuses to turn a volume into a weight. A cup of flour does not weigh what a cup of water weighs. If you buy by weight and cook by volume, this asks for a density instead of quietly assuming 1 mL = 1 g — an assumption that misprices every dry ingredient in the recipe and leaves a number that looks perfectly reasonable.

It counts what you throw away. Recipe quantities are edible portion. At an 80% yield you have to buy 312.5 g to end up with 250 g, and the trim is not free.

An ingredient it cannot cost is never counted as free. It is named, and the total is marked as an under-estimate.

The spreadsheet

The download is a real .xlsx where every derived cell is a formula over the cells above it, not a pasted number. Change a pack price and the cost per serving, the menu price and the margin all follow. There is no macro in it and it phones nothing home.

Nothing you type here is sent anywhere. The calculation and the Excel file are both produced in your browser. The only thing recorded is an anonymous count of how many people used the page.

Also here

Nutrition Facts label calculator — the FDA panel for the same recipe, with the 21 CFR 101.9(c) rounding applied.