What is recipe costing?

A recipe card says what goes into a dish. A costed recipe adds what each of those ingredients costs. For each line you need the quantity used, the unit it is bought in, the purchase price and the yield: a whole salmon yields fillets with skin, bones and trim left over, so the usable cost per gram is higher than the invoice price per gram.

The steps are always the same. Convert each ingredient to a cost per unit of use (per gram, millilitre or each). Multiply by the quantity in the recipe. Add an allowance for waste and trim. Add small items that are easy to forget: oil, salt, garnish, the takeout container. Divide by the number of portions the recipe makes. The result is the plate cost.

Recipes for prepared components, such as a sauce, a dough or a spice mix, are costed the same way and then used as ingredients in other recipes. When an ingredient price changes, every recipe that uses it changes too, which is why spreadsheets get out of date quickly and why kitchens move recipe costing into their POS or inventory system.

In SeroPOS, Recipe is part of the Manufacturing tools in the back office, on the Pro plan. A recipe lists ingredients with quantities and sub-units, grouped by ingredient group or production step, plus a waste percentage, an extra cost percentage and the total output quantity. Production runs consume ingredient stock and add finished stock at the computed cost, and 'Update product price' can reprice items from their recipe cost, one at a time or in bulk.