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What does each plate actually cost?

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Type a recipe. The tool walks the math from invoice to plate — including the bit most owners skip: the percentage that survives trim, peel, bone, and shrink. About 5 minutes per dish.

How we keep your recipes private · Why this matters

What this does. You type a recipe — what you bought, what you used, how much it yields after trim. The tool walks the math from as-purchased cost to edible-portion cost to plate cost. Then it suggests three menu prices, each one targeting a different food-cost percentage. Nothing leaves the browser; close the tab and the recipe is gone.

Your recipes do not leave this browser.

A recipe is a chef’s intellectual property. Five verifiable claims — each one you can confirm yourself in your browser’s DevTools in under a minute.

  1. No upload.

    Open DevTools → Network. Type a recipe, click Compute. Zero requests fire. The math runs on your device.

  2. No storage.

    Close the tab and reload this URL. The form is empty. We don’t use localStorage, sessionStorage, or cookies for your recipe data.

  3. URL-fragment encoding is opt-in.

    The address bar stays empty until you click Save & remind me to recost. Then the recipe is encoded into the link the calendar reminder carries. Per the HTTP spec, the part of a URL after # is never sent to a server — so the reminder lives only on your device, and the recipe never crosses the network.

  4. One bundled script.

    The tool loads /tools/plate-cost/plate-cost.js from this domain. No CDN, no analytics-tied recipe data, no third-party tracker reading the form.

  5. Anonymous, enum-bucketed analytics only.

    We log that “a 4–7 ingredient recipe was costed” in three or four buckets — never the ingredient names, prices, or recipe content.

Type a recipe.

Five common ingredients to start. Add or remove rows as needed. The tool fills in canonical yields for ~80 common ingredients automatically — override any one if your supplier’s product yields differently.

Recost from quarterly check-in This recipe was costed on —. Type today’s invoice prices into the AP price column — the headline below shows the drift since the baseline.
Reset to fresh recipe
Have a recipe spreadsheet? Paste it.

Drag a row range from Excel / Google Sheets and paste below — or paste a CSV. Headers like Ingredient, AP price, AP qty, AP unit, Yield %, Used qty, Used unit are auto-mapped. The tool also accepts Name, Cost, Qty, Unit, Yield, Amount, Recipe unit as aliases.

Ingredient AP price ($) AP qty AP unit Yield % Used qty Used unit Cost

📷 Snap an invoice photo instead beta

Take a clear photo of your supplier invoice — we'll read it on this device (the photo never leaves your phone) and pre-fill the rows below. Edit anything that misreads.

OCR runs entirely in your browser via Tesseract.js. No upload, no API call. Accuracy depends on lighting and contrast — bright, flat, well-focused photos work best.

Fill in a row above — or — to see the math.

What this is, and what it isn’t.

A working tool can be honest about its edges. The Plate Cost Calculator does five things well and a handful of related things not at all.

What this is

  • An honest plate-cost number per dish, after AP→EP yield correction.
  • The missing input for Menu Engineering Matrix and Margin Math.
  • A teaching tool — the AP / EP / yield math is visible.
  • A printable Plate Card for the kitchen wall.
  • A starting point for an honest conversation with your chef and accountant.

What this isn’t

  • An invoice scanner. Type AP cost from your actual invoice; we don’t guess prices.
  • A recipe substitution engine. The tool tells you what costs what; it doesn’t propose cheaper alternatives.
  • A POS connector. The pitch is “type your recipe” — a connector inverts that and breaks privacy.
  • A prime-cost calculator. Labour is required. Use Margin Math for that.
  • A menu engineering analysis. Use Menu Engineering Matrix for the per-dish portfolio call.

What it does next. The plate cost is the missing first input for two other tools. Click Add to Menu Engineering to see this dish on the Stars / Plowhorses / Puzzles / Dogs matrix. Click Use in Margin Math to model how it lands against your full prime cost. Or just print the Plate Card and tape it to the wall.

Learn more

Why this tool exists.

Every check this tool runs maps to a specific concept in the Library. Two starting points — one definition, one playbook.

Operations & Margin
Glossary

Plate cost

the real ingredient cost of one finished plate

What it costs you in ingredients to send one plate of a dish to the pass, after trim, peel, bone, and shrink. Computed per ingredient as edi…

Read the definition Glossary

Yield percent

the share of what you bought that ends up on a plate

For a given ingredient: the percentage of as-purchased weight that survives trim, peel, bone, fat, and cooking shrinkage. Romaine yields abo…

Read the definition Glossary

Edible portion (EP)

the cost of one usable ounce after trim

The cost of one unit of an ingredient after yield correction: EP cost = AP cost ÷ yield. Always ≥ the as-purchased cost; for low-yield items…

Read the definition Glossary

Food cost

cost of goods sold, as a % of sales

The cost of ingredients, alcohol, and consumables (paper goods, to-go packaging) expressed as a percentage of sales. Target 28–32% for most …

Read the definition Article

How to Raise Restaurant Menu Prices Without Losing Reservations

The honest playbook for raising menu prices on an independent restaurant's website — which items to raise, how to stage it, and the website moves that protect reservations.

Read the playbook
Pair with paperwork

Operator sheets that use this tool — printable, fillable, exports to CSV.