Food cost percentage, and the lie inside it
Divide what the ingredients cost by what you charge for the dish. That is your food cost percentage, the first number anyone learns on the management side of a kitchen. A dish costing 20 that sells for 80 runs at 25%, and most kitchens target somewhere around 28 to 35% overall.
It is useful, and it is the number that gets misread most often, because you cannot bank a percentage. You bank the difference.
Take two dishes. A salad costs 8 and sells for 32, so 25%, which looks excellent. A rack of lamb costs 45 and sells for 120, so 37.5%, which looks poor. The salad puts 24 in the till and the lamb puts 75. Sell one of each and the dish with the worse percentage contributed three times the cash. Chasing the percentage alone pushes a menu toward cheap ingredients at high margin, which is how a kitchen ends up with a menu full of pasta and no reason for anyone to come back. The number to read beside it is contribution — price minus cost, in currency — multiplied by how many you actually sell. A brilliant percentage on something that shifts twice a week is noise.
The other thing a single number hides is the gap between theoretical and actual. Theoretical is what your recipes say you should have spent given what you sold; actual is what you really spent. They never match, and when the gap widens it is one of a short list: portions drifting bigger than the recipe, waste, over-ordering, staff meal off the same stock, trim binned, or something walking out of the door. The percentage tells you nothing about which. The gap tells you where to look.
And it moves on its own, because supplier prices shift underneath you. A price set when tomatoes were cheap quietly worsens all season, and the first you hear is the quarter-end. Recost the dishes built on volatile ingredients more often than the rest.
