One proportion, repeated
Each line carries four things: the name, how much came in the package, what the package cost, and how much of it the recipe uses. Boneless chicken thighs | 48 | 12.99 | 32 is a 48 oz pack at $12.99 with 32 oz going into the pot, and the cost of that portion is 12.99 × 32 ÷ 48, or $8.66. The unit picker at the top changes the label in the results table and nothing else. The arithmetic only ever sees the ratio of used to bought, so as long as those two columns match each other within a line, you can cost chicken in ounces, soy sauce in fluid ounces and eggs in each, all in the same list.
That freedom is also the one place the tool cannot help. If you buy a spice by the ounce and use it by the teaspoon, the conversion between the two depends on the density of that particular spice, and there is no way to guess it from a name. Either weigh what you use, or look up a grams-per-tablespoon figure for that ingredient and convert before you type. A line where the package is in pounds and the amount used is in ounces will report a cost sixteen times too small, and the only clue is that the number looks wrong.
What "per serving" is really measuring
Cost per serving is the batch cost divided by a number you supplied, and that number is a judgment. Say the batch feeds eight when it comfortably feeds five and the per-serving cost drops by a third without anything changing in the kitchen. Yield is the same problem from the other side: a sauce that reduces for forty minutes does not weigh what went into it, and a bone-in chicken does not yield its full weight in meat. Trim, peel, bone, fat rendered off and the film left in the pan are all paid for and none of them reach the plate.
There are two honest ways to handle that here. Enter what you actually bought against the amount that ends up in the dish, which prices the trim into the recipe where it belongs. Or enter only the trimmed weight in both columns and accept that the recipe now looks cheaper than the grocery receipt. The first is the right one for costing a menu. The second is fine when you are only comparing two versions of the same dish.
The pantry allowance
Salt, black pepper, a slick of oil in the pan. Weighing these is more trouble than the number is worth, so the convention is to add a flat percentage on top of the ingredient subtotal and move on. Five percent is a common starting figure; a dish that is mostly sauce and spice wants more. The thing to watch is cost, not quantity: anything expensive belongs on its own row rather than smeared into a percentage. Saffron, vanilla extract and imported cheese all break a flat allowance badly, because the allowance scales with the cost of everything else rather than with how much of the expensive thing went in.
| Situation | Typical allowance | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Roasted or grilled, salt and oil only | 2-3% | Almost nothing off-list |
| Everyday braise or skillet dinner | 5% | Aromatics, a few spices, oil |
| Heavily spiced or sauced | 8-12% | Spice blends add up faster than they look |
| Baking | List everything | Leaveners and extracts are cheap per batch but the ratios matter |
Cents, and where the odd one goes
Every ingredient cost is a division, so almost none of them land on a whole cent. The batch total is carried at full precision and rounded once, at the end. That total is then split across servings by taking the floor in cents and handing the leftover cents out one per serving, so the parts always add back to the batch exactly. A $14.63 batch over six servings is not $2.44 each; it is $2.43 for three of them and $2.44 for the other three, and the result says so rather than quietly reporting a per-serving figure that multiplies back to the wrong total. Pricing a menu, the distinction does not matter. Invoicing a catering job for ninety covers, it does.
Reading the ranking
The table sorts by contribution, and the pattern is nearly always the same: one or two ingredients carry half the cost and the rest is rounding. That tells you where effort pays. Switching to a cheaper cut, buying the top item in a larger format, or trimming its portion by a fifth moves the number. Shaving the carrots does not. Sort by share, look at anything above forty percent, and ignore the bottom of the list entirely.
Questions people ask
Can I mix units across ingredients?
Yes. The only thing the calculation uses is the ratio of the amount used to the amount bought, so each line stands on its own. Meat in ounces, oil in fluid ounces, eggs in each and flour in grams all coexist in the same list and all come out right. The unit selector at the top only changes the label printed in the results table. What you cannot do is mix units within a single line: a package entered in pounds with a used amount in ounces is off by a factor of sixteen, and the tool only flags it when the used amount exceeds the amount bought.
How do I cost something I buy by weight but use by the spoon?
Convert it yourself before entering it, because the tool has no density table and cannot do it for you. A tablespoon of ground cinnamon and a tablespoon of honey weigh very different amounts, and nothing in the ingredient name tells you which. The reliable route is a kitchen scale: weigh what you actually put in, once, and write that number down for next time. Failing that, look up a published grams-per-tablespoon figure for that specific ingredient. Treat any number you get by assuming a spoon of anything weighs the same as a spoon of water as a rough estimate only.
Can I include gas, labor or packaging?
Add them as ingredient lines. Enter Labor, 40 min | 1 | 12.00 | 1 and the full $12.00 lands in the batch, because the used-over-bought ratio is one. The same trick works for takeout containers, delivery fees or an oven-hours estimate. The one consequence is that those amounts join the ingredient subtotal, so the percentage shares and the pantry allowance both shift. To see the food cost cleanly, run it once without them and once with.
Is the food cost percentage the same as profit margin?
No, and the gap is large. Food cost percentage is ingredients divided by selling price, which is a useful number for menu engineering and a poor one for deciding whether a dish makes money. Everything else a kitchen spends money on sits between that figure and profit: wages, rent, utilities, equipment, waste, comps, card processing and delivery commissions. A dish at 28 percent food cost can still lose money if it takes twenty minutes of skilled labor per plate. The percentage is worth tracking because it is easy to measure and moves when suppliers raise prices. It is not a substitute for a full cost of sale.