Yield is where the money hides
The arithmetic is one line. As-purchased cost divided by yield percentage gives the edible-portion cost. Everything else on this page is presentation.
What makes it worth a page of its own is how large the effect is and how rarely it is applied. Eight pounds of whole tenderloin at $18.40 a pound is $147.20 on the invoice. Trim it to a 62 percent yield and you have 4.96 pounds of usable meat carrying that same $147.20, which is $29.68 a pound. Roast it with an 18 percent cooking loss and 4.07 pounds reach plates, at $36.19 a pound served. A seven-ounce portion costs $15.83. Cost that same portion from the invoice price and you get $8.05. The dish is priced from a number that is less than half the truth, and no amount of care further down the menu recovers it.
A 60 percent yield does not cost you 40 percent more. It costs you 67 percent more, because you divide rather than subtract. The rule to hold onto is that halving the yield doubles the cost, and the cost curve gets steep fast below about 70 percent.
| Yield | Multiplier on the invoice price | $10/lb becomes |
|---|---|---|
| 90% | 1.11x | $11.11 |
| 75% | 1.33x | $13.33 |
| 60% | 1.67x | $16.67 |
| 50% | 2.00x | $20.00 |
| 35% | 2.86x | $28.57 |
| 25% | 4.00x | $40.00 |
Running a yield test that means something
This page will not give you a yield percentage, because a table of standard yields is exactly the thing that puts a wrong number into a costing with a confident air about it. Yields move with the supplier, the grade, the size and shape of the piece, the season, how the item was stored, and the skill and speed of whoever is holding the knife on a busy Friday. Two kitchens buying the same product from the same distributor will get different figures, and both are right for their own operation.
The test is a scale and five minutes. Weigh the item as it arrives. Break it down the way you actually break it down in service, not carefully. Weigh what you can sell. Weigh what is left over separately, because that pile has its own value. Divide usable by as-purchased and you have your trim yield. Do it three or four times across different deliveries and average, because a single test on an unusually good piece will flatter you for a year.
Cooking loss is a second test with the same scale. Weigh the portioned raw item, cook it exactly the way service cooks it, weigh it again. Keep it separate from the trim yield in your records, because they change independently: a new supplier moves the trim yield, a new oven or a changed doneness moves the cooking loss.
Trim is not always waste
Bones that become stock, scraps that become a staff meal, fat that gets rendered and trim that becomes a second dish all carry value, and the trim credit field lets you push some of the purchase cost onto them. Use it honestly. The credit belongs at what the recovered material is genuinely worth to you, which is usually what you would otherwise have paid for the equivalent product, not the per-pound price you paid for the whole item.
Two cautions. Crediting trim only reduces the main portion cost if you really do use it every time, and a stockpot that runs twice a month is not a credit on a daily item. And a generous credit can talk you into a low yield you should be arguing with your supplier about. If the entered credit is doing a lot of work, look at whether the number underneath it is real.
Buying prepped, and how to compare it fairly
The comparison people get wrong is prepped product against invoice price. A peeled, portioned or pre-cut item almost always looks expensive next to the whole one on the invoice and often is not, because the correct comparison is against your own edible-portion cost with your own yield and your own labour minutes attached. Work the whole item out here, add the labour minutes at your loaded rate from the employee cost calculator, and put that total against the delivered price of the prepped version at whatever its yield is. The prepped item usually has a yield too, just a higher one.
The other half of that decision is what happens to your line during service and to your storage. Prepped product frees labour hours you can schedule out or redeploy, and the value of that is only real if you actually change the schedule.
Feeding the answer forward
The edible-portion cost per pound is the number to carry into recipe costing, not the invoice price. Put it into the recipe cost calculator as the price for the amount you use, or straight into the plate cost column of the menu pricing calculator. If the item is a prep item made in batches, the yield also decides how much raw product a batch consumes, which feeds the prep batch size calculator.
One thing this calculator deliberately does not do is tell you anything about how long the trimmed product keeps, how it should be stored, or what temperature anything should be held at. Those are food safety questions governed by your local health authority and by your own written plan, and they are a different discipline from costing. The food safety guide is an introduction to the vocabulary, not a substitute for either.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between as-purchased and edible-portion cost?
As-purchased cost is what the invoice says: the price for the weight that came through the door, including bone, skin, peel, core, fat and everything else you will not serve. Edible-portion cost is that same money divided across only the weight that reaches a plate. They are the same total dollars measured against different denominators, and the ratio between them is the yield. Costing a menu from as-purchased prices is not a small approximation, it is a systematic understatement that gets worse the more preparation an item needs, and it is invisible because the invoice total still reconciles perfectly against the bank.
Should cooking loss be in the yield or handled separately?
Separately, which is why this calculator has two fields. They come from different causes and change at different times. Trim yield is about butchery and the product itself, so it moves when the supplier, grade or piece size changes. Cooking loss is about your method, so it moves when the oven, the doneness or the cook changes. Keeping them apart means you can see which one caused a drift. Whether cooking loss belongs in the costing at all depends on how you portion: if you weigh raw portions and price from those, the cooking loss is already inside the portion the guest is quoted, so set it to zero. If your portion size is what lands on the plate cooked, the loss has to be in the calculation.
Where do I get a yield percentage if I have not tested one?
Weigh it, this once. Published yield tables exist and every one of them carries a caveat, because yields vary enough between suppliers, grades and cooks that a borrowed figure gives false precision. If you are mid-costing and genuinely need a placeholder to move on, use one clearly marked as provisional and put the scale test on the list, because that placeholder will otherwise sit in your recipe file for years. The test costs five minutes on a delivery you were unpacking anyway, and for a high-volume item the difference between a guessed yield and a measured one is usually worth more than everything else you will do to that recipe.
Does yield matter for produce and dry goods too?
For produce very much so, and it is often ignored because the unit price is low. Anything peeled, cored, stemmed, hulled or leafed loses a large fraction of itself, and on items bought by the case those fractions add up to real money across a year. Dry goods bought and used in the same form have a yield of 100 percent and need nothing here. The one that catches people is anything that gets cooked and gains or loses water dramatically, like dried pulses and rice, where the useful figure is a portion yield per dry pound rather than a percentage: work out how many portions a pound of the dry product actually produces and divide the price by that.
How does yield change what I should be buying?
It changes the comparison entirely, and usually not in the direction people expect. Two suppliers quoting the same product at different prices are not comparable until both prices have been divided by their own yields, and the cheaper invoice frequently loses. The same is true of grades and of piece sizes, where a larger primal often trims to a better percentage. It is worth running a yield test on a sample from a new supplier before you switch on the basis of a quoted price, and worth re-running it a few months later, since yield is one of the quieter ways a delivered price can go up without the number on the invoice moving at all.