Recipe Costing & Menu Pricing Studio

About the Recipe Costing & Menu Pricing Studio

A costing workspace for restaurants, cafés, cloud kitchens, bakeries and caterers. Keep an ingredient library — what each pack costs, its supplier, its trim yield and cooking loss, its density and piece weight, and its allergens — then build recipes and sub-recipes (sauces, doughs, prep) from it. Each recipe shows its batch cost, its cost a portion, its food cost % at your menu price, and the menu price that meets your target food cost, gross margin or profit a portion, with GST, VAT or sales tax included or added and rounded up to your price point.

Change one ingredient’s price and every recipe that uses it — through its sub-recipes too — is costed again at once, and the old price is kept with its day for the price-change report. Units convert exactly within weight, volume and count, and between them through each ingredient’s own density or piece weight; a recipe that would contain itself is caught and named.

Without a pass, costing works on screen for all of your own ingredients and recipes; the recipe cards, the menu cost sheet and the price-change report show as pages marked “not for use”, and their PDF and CSV downloads unlock with a Premium pass. Your data stays in this browser; your own CSV files and backups always download, also in the free preview.

Common uses

• A café or restaurant costing its whole menu and setting prices for a target food cost.
• A bakery costing doughs, fillings and finished cakes as sub-recipes.
• A cloud kitchen adding packaging to every dish and checking which items still make money.
• A caterer reviewing which dishes a supplier’s new price list makes too cheap.
• Printing standard recipe cards with method and allergens for the kitchen.

How the costs are worked out

• Cost of one pack unit = pack price ÷ pack size (a 5 kg bag at 300 is 60 a kg).
• As bought: cost = quantity × that unit cost.
• Trimmed: cost = quantity ÷ trim yield × unit cost, because you buy more than you use.
• Cooked: cost = quantity ÷ (trim yield × (1 − cooking loss)) × unit cost.
• Sub-recipe: its batch cost ÷ what one batch makes gives a cost a litre, a kilogram or a piece, and a recipe that uses it pays for what it takes.
• Cost a portion = batch cost ÷ portions. Food cost % = cost a portion ÷ menu price before tax × 100. Gross margin % = 100 − food cost %.

Menu prices, tax and rounding

The price before tax that meets a target is cost ÷ target food cost (30% → cost ÷ 0.30), cost ÷ (1 − target margin), or cost + target profit. When menu prices include tax, the menu price is that × (1 + tax rate); when tax is added on the bill, the menu shows the price before tax. The suggested price is rounded up to your price point (the next 0.50, a price ending in .99, a whole price ending in 9 …), so rounding never takes you over your food cost target, and the food cost % is worked out again at the rounded price.

In India, restaurant service other than at “specified premises” is taxed at 5% GST (2.5% CGST + 2.5% SGST) without input tax credit (Notification No. 20/2019-Central Tax (Rate)); 18% with credit applies to restaurants at specified premises — premises from where hotel accommodation above ₹7,500 a unit a day is supplied, or that a hotel declares as such (Notification No. 05/2025-Central Tax (Rate)). Enter the rate that applies to you; elsewhere enter your VAT or sales-tax rate for food.

Yields, densities and pieces

• Trim yield: weigh a typical pack before and after trimming or peeling; usable ÷ bought × 100. Yield tables such as the USDA Food Buying Guide give typical figures, but your own produce and your cooks’ trimming decide yours.
• Cooking loss: weigh the trimmed piece raw and again cooked; (raw − cooked) ÷ raw × 100. It applies only to lines you measure cooked.
• Density (grams in one millilitre) lets a recipe use cups of flour or litres of oil when you buy by weight: weigh a level measured cup and divide by its millilitres. Water is 1.
• Piece weight lets “2 eggs” cost from a tray of 30, or “100 g egg” from eggs bought by the piece.

Price changes

Every time you save a new pack price, size or unit, the studio keeps the old one with its day (one record a day per ingredient). Price changes compares the prices of any day with now: which ingredients moved, by how much, and what that did to each recipe’s cost a portion and food cost % at its current menu price, with a new suggested price. The report is the list to review before you reprint a menu.

Limitations

• The studio keeps its data in this browser on this device: download a backup to move it, or to keep it safe.
• Costs are as good as the pack prices, yields and densities you enter; it does not know market prices.
• In files, a bare “pint”, “quart”, “gallon” or “fl oz” is read as the US unit in the United States and the imperial one in the United Kingdom (a US pint is 473 ml, a UK pint 568 ml); elsewhere write “US pint” or “UK pint”. A bare “cup” is the US cup in the United States and the 250 ml metric cup everywhere else; in Australia a bare “tbsp” is the 20 ml Australian tablespoon.
• It costs food and the packaging you add as lines; labour, energy and rent are not in the food cost.
• It does not count stock: the Food Cost Variance Analyzer compares what the recipes should have used with what you used.
• Allergens on recipe cards come from what you record for each ingredient; check them against your suppliers’ specifications.

Privacy

On this device; its files download once

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot. Downloads the PDF engine and its fonts from this site the first time you make a document; your ingredients, prices and recipes never leave this browser.