Recipe cost calculator

How to cost a recipe

A recipe cost is only as accurate as its unit prices. Most costing mistakes come from two places: using the price per kilo on the invoice without allowing for trim, and mixing up units between how you buy and how you cook. This calculator starts from the pack you actually buy and works down to the cost of the amount in the recipe.

Worked example: short rib from a 10 kg case

Short rib arrives in a 10 kg case at $98. After trimming fat and silver skin you keep 8.2 kg, an 82% yield. The braise uses 4 kg of trimmed meat.

Costing the meat at the invoice price would have said $39.20, so the recipe would look $8.60 cheaper than it is. On a dish you sell 200 times a month, that gap is the difference between a healthy margin and a dish that quietly loses money.

Units: buy in one, cook in another

Suppliers sell by the case, the kilo and the litre; recipes use grams, millilitres and pieces. Enter both and the calculator converts kilos to grams and litres to millilitres for you. It will flag a line where the pack unit and the recipe unit don't match (kilos bought, millilitres used), because converting weight to volume needs a density that only you know. For those, set a custom conversion, such as 1 bunch of parsley = 60 g.

Typical yields to start from

Yields vary with supplier, size and how your team preps, so measure your own with the yield calculator. As a rough guide, whole fish and bone-in cuts lose the most, root vegetables lose a little to peel, and dry goods, dairy and liquids are close to 100%.

Write it down once

Once a recipe is costed, put it on a recipe card with quantities, yield and method so every cook makes the same portion, and add it to your prep list. Then check its food cost against the menu price with the food cost calculator.

Common recipe costing mistakes

• Costing from the price list, not the invoice. Delivery charges, minimum-order fees and surprise substitutions all change what you really paid. The invoice is the truth.
• Forgetting the "free" ingredients. Oil for the pan, salt, stock powder, the butter that finishes the sauce. Each is small, but a recipe that ignores them can be 5–10% under its real cost.
• Mixing up cooked and raw weights. If the recipe says 4 kg of short rib, decide whether that is trimmed raw weight or cooked weight and cost it consistently. Braising can lose a third of the weight.
• Costing once and never again. A recipe costed in spring is wrong by autumn. Re-cost whenever a main ingredient changes price, and at least every quarter.
• Ignoring portion drift. A recipe that makes 10 portions on paper but 9 in practice costs 11% more per plate. Check real portion counts against the recipe card every few weeks.

A simple habit fixes most of these: when an invoice arrives, look at the three or four ingredients that make up most of your costs and check whether their prices moved. Those few lines decide whether the menu still makes money.

Doing this by hand works for a handful of dishes. When you have 40 recipes and prices change weekly, BrigadeKit keeps every recipe and sub-recipe costed from your latest invoices and tells you which dishes moved.

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