Recipe Costing Spreadsheet, Excel Google Sheets, Restaurant Food Cost Calculator, Menu Engineering and Plate Cost Tracker (Digital Download)

RECIPE COSTING AND MENU PROFIT — Excel and Google Sheets, with a worked quarter inside

A 5 kg vac pack of sirloin at $118 is $23.60 a kilo. That is the number on the invoice, and it is the number nearly every costing sheet uses.

Then you trim it. Twelve per cent goes in the bin — sinew, the tail, the fat you take off. You did not buy 5 kg of steak. You bought 4.4 kg of steak and 600 g of waste, and you paid $118 for both.

$118 over 4.4 kg is $26.82 a kilo. Every 250 g portion costs $6.71, not $5.90.

Garlic is worse. Eighteen dollars for a 5 kg box is $3.60 a kilo; peel it and you are cooking with $5.00 a kilo — thirty-nine per cent above what you paid. Butternut squash adds forty-seven per cent. Leeks, celery, herbs and shellfish are all in the same territory.

THIS FILE FIXES TWO THINGS, AND THEY ARE THE TWO THAT COST YOU

1. THE PRICE OF A USABLE GRAM
Put in the pack you buy, the price you paid and what you honestly lose to trim. The Ingredients tab works out the cost of a gram that actually reaches a plate, and that is the only price the rest of the workbook is allowed to use. Two columns beside it show what you would have costed the dish at if you had ignored the trim, and the gap between the two.

2. PER CENT IS NOT MONEY
A flat white at $3.60 runs a nine per cent food cost, which looks magnificent. A sirloin at $26.50 runs thirty-three per cent, which looks like a problem. The flat white leaves $2.08 behind. The sirloin leaves $11.77. You would need six coffees to replace one steak — and you have not got six more coffees, you have got the same tables.

So the Menu tab carries CONTRIBUTION: what is left of a sale after the food, after the minutes it takes to plate it, and after the box it goes in. Food cost per cent tells you whether a dish is priced well. Contribution tells you whether it is worth cooking. They disagree more often than you would think, and the whole workbook ranks by the second one.

AND ONE MORE: WHERE THE PRICE RISES WENT
Suppliers put prices up one line at a time and nobody changes the menu, because nobody can see it happening. When a price moves, put the old pack price in one column before you type the new one — four seconds. The Menu tab then shows how many points of food cost each dish has quietly given up, and the Purchasing tab puts a number on it. In the worked example the last round of rises cost the bistro $5,491 in a single quarter, and the Dashboard names the eight ingredients responsible.

THE TEN TABS

Setup — nine settings: whether your menu prices include tax, the rate, your target food cost, what an hour of kitchen time really costs you, your fixed costs a week, and the buffer on next week's order. Everything downstream is built from these.
Ingredients — 200 rows. Pack, price, size, unit, trim. Out comes the cost of a usable gram, the cost per kilo or litre, what the trim adds, and how far the price has moved.
Preps — 30 stocks, sauces, doughs and butters. Cost the batch once; the menu then spends it by the gram. Change a beef price and every dish carrying ragu reprices itself.
Recipe Lines — 900 rows, the engine. Grams, kilos, millilitres, litres, ounces, pounds, pints or items — type whichever the recipe is written in. The Check column catches a misspelled ingredient, a unit that does not match, a missing quantity and a prep inside a prep, in plain words rather than a red error code.
Menu — 60 dishes. Food cost, food cost %, gross profit, kitchen labour, packaging, contribution, what it cost before the last round of rises, the drift since, and the price that would hit your target.
Sales — thirteen weeks of counts off the till. The only tab that needs typing after the first evening.
Menu Engineering — Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles and Dogs, with a sentence each on what to do. Popularity is measured inside a section, not across the whole menu, because a coffee is not competing with a steak.
Purchasing and Usage — what the quarter actually ate, ingredient by ingredient, worked back through every prep. Packs a week, an order list, and what each supplier's rise took out of you.
Dashboard — five charts, the section and week-by-week tables, and the sales you need just to break even.
Start Here — the guide, inside the workbook as well as in the PDF.

THE EXAMPLE WAS NOT TYPED BY HAND
There is a real-looking neighbourhood bistro in the file: Harrow & Vine, forty-four covers, ninety-three ingredients, twelve preps, forty-four dishes, two hundred and fifty-two recipe lines and thirteen weeks of sales. Nothing is blank, so you can watch every column behave before you touch it.

None of it was invented. The sales were generated week by week from a popularity weight and every dish is costed from the same ingredient list — which is why one starter comes out at forty-five per cent food cost, and why the file says so instead of hiding it.

TWO COPIES IN THE DOWNLOAD
One workbook has the quarter filled in, so you can see what every column expects before you touch anything. The second is the same file completely blank: same ten tabs, same formulas, same charts, the unit table and the category lists still there, ready for your first ingredient. Start on whichever suits you.

WORKS WITH
Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer, Windows or Mac. Google Sheets — upload and open with Sheets; every formula works, the dropdowns look a little different, the print settings do not carry across. LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ons, no login.

WHO IT IS FOR
A café, bistro, pub kitchen, bakery, food truck, coffee shop, small catering business or ghost kitchen — anywhere one person is doing the ordering, the costing and the rota. It is built for a menu of up to sixty items, not for a chain with a central production unit.

HONEST LIMITS — please read before buying
- It is not a stock system. It does not count what is in the walk-in and it does not do a stock take. It costs recipes and reads sales.
- It is not accounting software. No VAT or sales tax return, no payroll, no supplier ledger, no bank feed.
- One level of prep. A prep may contain ingredients. A prep inside another prep is not supported — and rather than get it quietly wrong, the Check column says so.
- Kitchen labour is an average: minutes to plate times your hourly cost. It does not model a rush, a second chef or a bad Saturday.
- Waste beyond trim is yours to watch. The file costs the trim you tell it about. It cannot see the tray that got dropped.
- The worked example is a UK-style bistro with tax-inclusive menu prices. If you add sales tax at the till, set "menu prices include tax" to No and the rate to 0 — one cell, and every number below it is right.
- One menu per file. Two sites or two menus means two copies.
- It does not read your computer's clock. Everything counts from one date on Setup. A file that changes under you every morning is a file you stop trusting.
- Capacity: 200 ingredients, 30 preps, 900 recipe lines, 60 dishes, 13 weeks of sales.

WHAT ARRIVES
Two .xlsx workbooks and a plain-English Start Here guide as a PDF. Instant download — no app, no login, no monthly fee.

I never ask for shop access. No password, no manager invite, no app permissions. You download a file; that is the whole transaction.

Licence: for your own business. Reselling or redistributing the file is not allowed.

Something wrong with it? Message me through Etsy and I will fix the file.