In short
- A sheet that works out the food cost of a dish or menu from the recipes already in Savour.
- Have a price list from your supplier? Load it in, with the discount you agreed. That way you always calculate with your own, current prices.
- Menu engineering follows: which dishes sell well and earn well, with the allergens right alongside.
What is food cost?
Food cost is the part of the selling price spent on ingredients. You calculate it like this: the cost of the ingredients divided by the selling price excluding VAT, times 100.
An example: if the ingredients of a dish cost € 6.00 and you sell it for € 24.00 excluding VAT, the food cost is 25%. For comparison: in 2024 Dutch restaurants spent an average of 31.1% of their revenue on food and drink purchases (CBS). More figures in What does a restaurant cost?.
Ingredients per portion: € 6.00
Selling price excluding VAT: € 24.00
Food cost: 6.00 ÷ 24.00 × 100 = 25%
From your own recipes
In a separate spreadsheet you keep everything twice: the recipe in the kitchen and the quantities in the sheet. Change the recipe and the sheet is wrong. In Savour the quantities are already in your recipes. The calculator uses them, including base recipes: the stock, the dough and the sauce count towards the price of the dish they are in.
If you work with a yield, such as 10 portions or 2 litres, Savour calculates back to the price per portion.
Your prices, with your discount
Every kitchen buys differently. So you calculate with your own prices. Enter them yourself, or load your supplier’s price list if you have one. Agreed a discount with your supplier? Add it. That way you calculate with what you really pay, not the list price.
When the price list changes, load the new one and Savour recalculates all your dishes. You immediately see which dish drops below your target because of more expensive purchases.
- Food cost per dish and per portion, including base recipes.
- Food cost of a whole menu.
- Enter your own prices or load your supplier’s price list.
- Apply your personal supplier discount.
- A target percentage per dish, with a warning when you go over it.
Next: menu engineering
A low food cost alone does not tell the whole story. A dish with 22% food cost that hardly anyone orders earns less than a dish with 32% that goes out every night. Menu engineering puts both side by side: how often you sell a dish, and what you earn per plate.
The well-known model comes from Kasavana and Smith (1982) and splits your menu into four groups:
- Stars: sell well and earn well. Keep them as they are.
- Plowhorses: sell well but earn little. Look at the portion or the price.
- Puzzles: earn well but sell little. A better place on the menu or a different description.
- Dogs: sell little and earn little. Candidates for replacement.
Everything linked together
Because everything in Savour comes from the same recipes, it all hangs together. Change a recipe and the cost price, the menu analysis and the allergens change at the same time. Swap the mayonnaise in the house dressing for another one and you immediately see what it costs and whether an allergen is added or removed.
When?
We are building the food cost calculator first, then menu engineering. There is deliberately no date: a feature goes live when it is good enough for the rush of a service. Want to share ideas or help test? Email contact@savour.page. What else is planned is on Coming soon.
This article describes a feature we are building now. If anything changes, we will update it here.