The headline Cost Index
The Muntin Restaurant Basket.
The headline number of the Cost Index isn’t one ingredient — it’s a basket. The Muntin Restaurant Basket is a fixed, weighted set of 16 wholesale ingredients chosen to approximate what an independent restaurant actually buys. It reports one thing: the rate of change of that declared basket, on public U.S. wholesale data. It is not a national price level, and not what any one restaurant pays.
What’s in it
Sixteen ingredients, weighted toward where the money actually goes — proteins and cooking oil carry roughly 62% of the basket, because that’s where an independent kitchen’s spend concentrates. Eggs and produce are capped: they’re the most volatile, but a small share of spend, so their spikes are surfaced per-ingredient rather than allowed to thrash the headline.
IngredientRelative weight
- Chicken breast · Protein 0.17
- Vegetable oil · Fat 0.12
- Ribeye · Protein 0.11
- Pork loin · Protein 0.07
- Butter · Dairy 0.06
- Cheddar cheese · Dairy 0.06
- Whole chicken · Protein 0.06
- Onion · Produce 0.055
- Russet potato · Produce 0.055
- Eggs · Eggs 0.05
- Pork shoulder · Protein 0.05
- Romaine lettuce · Produce 0.05
- Tomato · Produce 0.05
- Beef tenderloin · Protein 0.04
- Shrimp · Seafood 0.04
- Salmon fillet · Seafood 0.03
Weights are Muntin’s internal judgment of a representative purchase mix — illustrative, not a sourced figure — and are frozen at version 2026-Q2. They are never re-weighted to whatever data is densest; a change requires a versioned methodology note, so a reading stays comparable across quarters.
How it’s computed
Each ingredient contributes its own composite wholesale price trend. The basket takes the weighted median of those trends — the median, not the mean, so a single outlier can’t carry the headline. Coverage is the share of declared weight that resolved from a live public source; confidence steps down as coverage or agreement fall. The full method is on the methodology page.
What it is, and what it isn’t
- It is a rate-of-change for a fixed, declared basket, on public wholesale and index data.
- It isn’t a national price level, a retail price, or “what restaurants pay” — that depends on your vendors, your region, and your volume.
- It’s frozen and versioned, so a reading this quarter is comparable to one next quarter.
- It’s citable. Name it the Muntin Restaurant Basket (v2026-Q2) and link this page.
Read the live index
This page is the basket’s definition. The live reading — what the basket is doing now, and every ingredient under it — is on the Cost Index, dated at the source.
Sister surfaces
- Cost Index — the live read, ingredient by ingredient
- Methodology — how the number is computed
- Sources — the public data behind each ingredient
- Claim ledger — every figure we publish, with its source