What is a recipe cost card — and why your restaurant needs one
A recipe cost card is a dish's technical sheet showing its true cost per portion. Without it, you have no way of knowing whether you're making or losing money on each cover.
A restaurant can have the most organised kitchen in the world and still lose money on every dish. The recipe cost card — a technical sheet with the itemised cost per portion — is what prevents that from happening.
What a recipe cost card actually is
It's a document that lists all the ingredients in a dish, their gross quantities (before waste), the unit cost of each, and the total cost per portion. The result is the theoretical production cost of that dish.
Simple example: a salad with lettuce (€0.15), tomato (€0.22), tuna (€0.65), olives (€0.18), and dressing (€0.08) has a cost of €1.28 per portion. If you sell it at €8.00, the food cost for that dish is 16% — excellent.
Why waste is critical in recipe costing
Recipe cost cards work with gross quantities, not net. If you need 200g of cleaned meat and the cut has 25% trimming waste, you need to purchase 267g. The cost you record on the card is based on 267g, not 200g.
Ignoring this is the most common mistake — and the one that most distorts theoretical food cost.
Recipe cost card vs. recipe
A recipe describes how a dish is made. A recipe cost card quantifies how much it costs to produce. You can have recipes without cost cards, but without them you have no control over your menu's profitability.
How to use recipe cost cards for pricing
The standard formula: Selling price = Portion cost ÷ Target food cost %
If you're targeting a 30% food cost and your cost card shows €3.50, the minimum selling price is 3.50 ÷ 0.30 = €11.67. From there, you decide whether the market will support that price or whether you need to reformulate the dish.
Automating recipe cost cards with Kitchen Stocker
Kitchen Stocker's recipe module calculates the cost per portion automatically. When you add the ingredients from your cost card, the system cross-references the current price of each product — updated with every supplier invoice — and recalculates the cost in real time. If the price of olive oil rises, the cost of every dish that uses it updates automatically.
Kitchen Stocker calculates this automatically
No spreadsheets. No manual calculations. Real data every day.