Food Cost per Serving Calculator
Calculate the cost per serving for any recipe.
Add up ingredient costs and divide by servings to find your true per-plate cost.
Food cost per serving is the backbone of menu pricing in both restaurants and home meal planning — it tells you exactly how much the ingredients for one portion of a dish actually cost.
The two formulas this calculator runs:
Cost per Serving = Total Recipe Ingredient Cost ÷ Number of Servings Menu Price = Cost per Serving ÷ Target Food Cost %
One it does not, and why it matters
Yield is the part nobody accounts for and it can move the answer by a third. What you pay for at the till is not what lands on the plate: bone, skin, peel, trim and rendered fat all leave. Bone-in chicken comes in around 65% usable meat, a chicken breast 85 to 90%, ground beef 75 to 80% once the fat has run off, and fresh vegetables anywhere from 70 to 90% after peeling.
The calculator does not ask for yield, because there is no honest default. Do it yourself before you type: divide what you paid by the yield as a decimal, then enter that. A $6 pack of bone-in thighs at 65% is really $9.23 of meat, and that is the number the recipe actually consumed.
Dry pasta and rice run the other way. They gain two to two and a half times their weight in water, so a portion of cooked pasta costs less than the raw weight suggests.
Worked example — Pasta Arrabiata for 4 servings:
| Ingredient | Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Rigatoni pasta (dry) | 400g | $1.20 |
| Canned San Marzano tomatoes | 400g | $2.50 |
| Garlic (4 cloves) | 20g | $0.30 |
| Olive oil | 40 mL | $0.60 |
| Chili flakes, salt, herbs | — | $0.20 |
| Total recipe cost | $4.80 |
Cost per serving = $4.80 ÷ 4 = $1.20 per serving If targeting 30% food cost: Menu price = $1.20 ÷ 0.30 = $4.00 If targeting 25% food cost: Menu price = $1.20 ÷ 0.25 = $4.80
Home cook use: Tracking cost per serving reveals which meals deliver the best value. A lentil or bean dish and a beef dish are not in the same league, and the gap is usually several times over rather than a few cents. Any dollar figures on this page are rough US grocery prices and go stale quickly, so price your own basket rather than trusting a number you read anywhere, including here.
The two optional fields at the bottom are what turn this from arithmetic into a decision. Put in what the same dish costs from a restaurant and you find out whether cooking it is actually worth the evening. Put in a target food cost percentage and you get the menu price a kitchen would need to charge.
How we build and check this calculator
This calculator runs entirely in your browser, so the numbers you enter stay on your device. The math behind it is written by hand and tested against worked examples and standard references before the page goes live.
SuperGlobalCalculator is independently built and maintained. See how we build and verify our calculators.