Food cost percentage: how to calculate and control it
What food-cost percentage is, what a healthy number looks like, and the practical levers that protect your margin in PKR.
Food cost is, alongside labour, one of the two largest controllable costs in any restaurant. Get it wrong and even a busy kitchen can lose money. The good news: it's a number you can measure and manage on every single dish.
What food-cost percentage means
Food-cost percentage is the ingredient (raw material) cost of a dish divided by its menu price, multiplied by 100. A dish that costs Rs 300 in ingredients and sells for Rs 950 has a food cost of about 31.6%. The lower the percentage, the more of each sale you keep before labour and overheads.
What's a healthy number?
Most restaurants aim to keep food cost under 30–35% of the menu price. Quick-service and high-volume concepts often run lower; ingredient-heavy fine dining can run higher. There's no single right answer — the target depends on your concept, your rent and your volume.
The levers that actually move it
- Cost every recipe properly, in PKR, before you set the price — don't guess.
- Cut waste and over-portioning; both quietly inflate cost per dish.
- Re-cost when supplier prices move — Pakistani ingredient prices shift fast.
- Engineer the menu toward your higher-margin dishes.
Stop tracking it in a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is fine until prices change and stock walks out the back door. Bhookly ties recipes to inventory, so stock deducts automatically on every sale and you see the real food cost of each dish without re-keying anything. Try our free food-cost calculator to sanity-check a dish in seconds.