Start with an honest recipe
A costed recipe is only as good as the quantities in it. Watch the dish being made on a busy night, weigh what actually goes in, and write that down. If the recipe card says 150 g of fries and the line serves 200 g, your costing is wrong by a third before you start. Standard recipes also make dishes consistent, which guests notice.
For prepared components (sauces, doughs, dressings, spice mixes) write a batch recipe and record how much it yields. These become ingredients in the dishes that use them.
Cost per unit, yield and waste
Take each ingredient's latest invoice price and convert it to the unit the recipe uses. A 4 kg case of chicken thighs at $36.00 is $9.00 a kilo, or $0.009 a gram. Then adjust for yield: if trimming loses 10%, the usable cost is $9.00 / 0.90 = $10.00 a kilo. Cooking loss works the same way for anything weighed raw and served cooked.
Add a waste allowance for the dish or the batch, typically a few percent, to cover spoilage and the odd dropped plate. Then add the small items. A garnish, a portion of oil and a takeout container can add 30 to 60 cents to a plate, which is a real share of a $14 dish.
From plate cost to menu price
The usual method is to divide plate cost by your target food cost percentage. A plate costing $4.20 at a 30% target gives $14.00. Round to a price that fits the menu, and sanity-check it against what guests expect to pay for that kind of dish nearby.
Not every dish needs the same percentage. Low-cost, high-volume items such as fries, pasta and soft drinks often carry a lower food cost and subsidise premium items such as steak or seafood, which carry a higher percentage but more dollars of profit per plate. What matters is the weighted average across what you actually sell.
Keep it current
Ingredient prices move, and a recipe costed in January can be wrong by June. Re-cost the dishes that use your biggest ingredients whenever their prices change, and compare theoretical food cost (from recipes and sales) with actual food cost (from inventory and purchases) each month. A widening gap points to waste, portioning or theft, not pricing.
Doing it in SeroPOS
Recipe costing in SeroPOS is part of the Manufacturing tools in the back office, included on the Pro plan. Ingredients are ordinary products with a purchase cost, so the recipe cost follows your latest purchase prices.
- Back office, Manufacturing, then Recipe: choose the dish (product or variation), or copy from an existing recipe.
- Add ingredients with quantity and sub-unit, grouped by ingredient group or production step.
- Enter the waste percentage, any extra cost as a percentage of ingredient cost, and the total output quantity.
- View the recipe to see the cost per unit of output.
- Use Update product price to set selling prices from recipe cost, for one recipe or in bulk.
- Run Production for batch items such as sauces, so ingredient stock goes down and finished stock goes up at the computed cost.
- Check the Manufacturing Report and the Profit / Loss report to compare costs with sales.