What Is Food Cost Percentage? Portion Drift Beats Supplier Prices
Published 6/1/2026 · 8 min read · Business tools
Food cost percentage is the cost of the food you sold divided by the revenue you earned from selling it, expressed as a percentage. At the level of a single dish it is the plate cost divided by the menu price: a plate costing $3.30 sold at $12.00 runs at 27.5 percent. At the level of the whole kitchen it is opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock, divided by food revenue for the same period — which is why it can only be measured properly if you count stock. Target ranges depend entirely on the format: a bar pours at 18 to 24 percent, a quick-service kitchen sits around 25 to 30 percent, a casual restaurant around 28 to 32 percent, and fine dining routinely runs 30 to 35 percent because expensive proteins are the point. The most useful thing to know is which input actually moves the number. On the plate above, an extra 30 grams of chicken — a portion difference nobody would notice on the plate — costs $0.27 and adds 2.25 points, and 6 percent kitchen waste adds another 1.9, for 31.65 percent in total. A 5 percent increase from every supplier at once adds only 1.38 points. Portioning and waste are almost always bigger levers than purchase prices, and unlike prices they are entirely inside your control.
A $3.30 plate on a $12.00 menu is 27.5 percent. An extra 30 grams of chicken and 6 percent waste push it to 31.65 percent — while a 5 percent supplier increase moves it only 1.38 points.
Costing one plate, line by line
Take a plated chicken main. The protein is 180 grams of breast at $9.00 per kilo, which is $1.62. Potatoes are 200 grams at $1.50 per kilo, or $0.30. Cream and butter come to 40 grams at $7.50 per kilo, another $0.30. Vegetables are 120 grams at $4.00 per kilo, or $0.48. Stock, oil, herbs and seasoning add $0.40 between them, and bread with the garnish adds $0.20. The plate costs $3.30. Sold at $12.00 excluding tax, that is a food cost of 27.5 percent — inside the casual-restaurant band with a little room to spare.
That 27.5 percent is a laboratory number: it assumes the recipe card is followed exactly and nothing is thrown away. Neither assumption survives a busy service. The gap between the plate cost you calculated and the food cost your stock count reports is the entire subject of kitchen cost control, and it is almost always larger than anyone expects. Before deciding your prices are wrong, cost three of your highest-volume dishes this way, weight them by how many you actually sell, and compare that blended figure to what your inventory says. Two very different numbers mean the problem is in the kitchen, not on the menu.
Portion drift and waste move more than supplier prices
Suppose the chef plates 210 grams of chicken instead of 180 — thirty grams, roughly a thumb's width on the plate, and nobody in the dining room notices. That is $0.27 of extra cost, the plate goes to $3.57, and the percentage rises from 27.5 to 29.75: a full 2.25 points from a portioning habit. Now add 6 percent kitchen waste, which covers trim, spoilage, mistakes and staff meals — a realistic figure for a kitchen without tight controls. The effective cost per plate sold becomes $3.80 and the percentage 31.65. Between the drift and the waste, the dish has moved 4.15 points, from comfortably profitable to the edge of the acceptable band, without a single supplier changing a price.
Now compare that to a price shock. If every supplier raises every ingredient by 5 percent at once — a bad quarter by any standard — the plate goes from $3.30 to $3.47 and the percentage from 27.5 to 28.88. That is 1.38 points, less than the portioning change alone. Even a 10 percent across-the-board increase only costs 2.75 points, still less than the drift and waste together. This is why the standard reaction to a rising food cost — renegotiate with suppliers, switch to a cheaper protein — is usually aimed at the smaller of the two levers. At 3,000 covers a month, the drift and waste on this one dish cost about $1,490 a month; a scale, a portion spoon and a written waste log recover most of it and cost almost nothing.
Why the target range is not a target
The percentages in the table above are industry convention, not a published standard, and they say nothing about whether a business makes money. A dish at 35 percent that sells forty covers a night contributes far more cash than a dish at 22 percent that sells four. Percentage is a ratio; rent, wages and the electricity bill are paid in currency. That is why menu engineering works on contribution per dish rather than on percentage: the right question is how much gross profit each item leaves after its own cost, multiplied by how often it sells, not which item has the prettiest ratio.
One further caution about the whole-kitchen figure. It is only meaningful if you count stock at both ends of the period; without a count, purchases in the month are being divided by sales in the month, and a single large delivery on the last day of the month will make the number look terrible while the same delivery on the first day of the next will make it look excellent. Count stock on the same day each period, measure food and beverage separately because their ranges are nowhere near the same, and read the trend across four or five periods rather than reacting to one. A single month's food cost percentage is mostly noise about when the deliveries arrived.
| Format | Typical range | Why it sits there | What usually breaks it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fine dining | 30–35 % | Expensive proteins and short-season produce are the product; high check averages and high labour carry them | Trim loss on whole fish and primal cuts — the yield assumption, not the price per kilo |
| Casual full-service restaurant | 28–32 % | The band most industry benchmarks quote by default, and the one most menus are engineered around | Portion drift on the three or four dishes that make up most covers |
| Quick service and fast casual | 25–30 % | Short menu, pre-portioned components and machine-consistent builds hold the yield steady | Free extras at the counter — sauces, refills and the second napkin-wrapped portion |
| Pizza | 18–25 % | Flour, tomato and cheese are cheap per plate, so the ratio is structurally low | Cheese weight and cheese price — one ingredient carries most of the exposure |
| Bar — spirits and draught beer | 18–24 % | Pour cost rather than food cost; the margin on a measured spirit is the highest in hospitality | Free pouring, over-topped glasses and untracked staff drinks — measured pours are the whole discipline |
| Coffee shop and bakery | 20–28 % | Very cheap inputs per unit sold, with milk and coffee the only material lines | Everything unsold at closing time — waste at close is the dominant line, not purchase price |
Worked with our own calculator
Food cost percentage calculator
Given
- Food cost
- $4.00
- Menu price
- $13.00
Result
- Food cost percentage
- 30.77%
These figures are produced by the calculator below, not typed in by hand — they are recomputed whenever the tool changes.
Run it on your own figures →Frequently asked questions
- Should the menu price in the calculation include sales tax or VAT?
- No. Divide the plate cost by the price excluding tax, because the tax is collected on behalf of the government and never belongs to the restaurant. Using the tax-inclusive price flatters the ratio by several points and makes your percentage incomparable to every published benchmark. Where reduced hospitality rates apply, using the gross price also makes eat-in and takeaway look different when the underlying economics are identical.
- Do staff meals and comped dishes count in food cost?
- They consume stock, so they show up in the kitchen-wide figure whether you want them to or not. Best practice is to record them separately and subtract them from the food-cost numerator, then report staff meals as a labour cost and comps as a marketing or service-recovery cost. Leaving them inside food cost is not wrong, but it hides how much of the number is a management decision rather than a kitchen problem, and it makes your ratio look bad for a reason no portion control will fix.
- My food cost is above target — should I raise prices?
- Check the three cheaper fixes first. Re-weigh your top-selling dishes against their recipe cards, because portion drift is the most common cause and costs nothing to correct. Keep a written waste log for two weeks, since what gets recorded shrinks on its own. And check the sales mix: your percentage can rise with no dish changing at all if customers have simply shifted towards your lower-margin items. Raising prices works, but it is the one lever a competitor can see, and it usually fixes the smaller half of the problem.
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