Why do most free food cost templates get the numbers wrong?

Two reasons. They ask for a cost per gram you have to work out yourself instead of the pack price you actually paid, and they ignore yield. If you buy a whole salmon side and only 62 percent of it reaches the plate, every usable gram costs about 1.6 times the sticker price. A template that skips yield understates your food cost on exactly the expensive proteins where it matters most.

What is a good food cost percentage?

Most full service restaurants aim for roughly 28 to 35 percent, though it varies widely by concept: pizza and pasta run far lower, steak and seafood far higher. The number that matters is not the industry average but whether each dish clears the target you set, which is why this spreadsheet flags any dish over your own target rather than a generic one.

Do I have to convert units myself?

No. Enter flour as a 25 kg sack and use it in grams; enter oil as a 5 litre drum and use it in millilitres. The spreadsheet normalises weight, volume and count units and does the conversion for you.

Yes. No email gate, no sign-up, no trial. It opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice.

Misekitchen costing

Free recipe & menu costing spreadsheet

Work out a true plate cost in the calculator below, or take the spreadsheet. Both handle pack sizes and yield — the part that trips everyone up.

Mise · Updated September 2026

Most free food-cost templates ask you for a cost per gram. But you don’t buy grams — you buy a 25 kg sack of flour, a 5 litre drum of oil, a whole side of salmon. Converting all that by hand is where the errors creep in, and it’s why so many costing sheets quietly understate the dishes that matter most.

Download the costing spreadsheet

.xlsx — Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice

⬇ Download free — no email

Plate cost calculator

Enter what you buy and how much you use. Yield is applied automatically. Nothing is uploaded.

Ingredient

Pack size

Unit

Pack cost

Yield %

Qty used

Unit

Line cost

Menu price

Target food cost %

Portions per recipe

—Plate cost

—Food cost %

—Gross profit

—Price at target

The costing spreadsheet: an ingredients table showing pack size, pack cost and yield with a calculated usable cost per unit; a recipe table costing 180 g of salmon at $6.39; and a menu summary showing $6.67 plate cost, $28.00 menu price, 23.8% food cost and $21.33 gross profit. — What’s inside the file — blue cells are yours, everything green is calculated.

The thing almost every free template gets wrong

Yield. You buy a side of salmon at $22/kg. After skin, pin bones and trim, about 62% reaches the plate. So every usable gram costs you 1.6× the sticker price — $0.0355/g, not $0.022/g.

On a 180 g portion that’s the difference between costing it at $3.96 and the truth, $6.39. Do that across a menu and you can run a “30% food cost” that is really 40%, and never understand why the margin isn’t there at the end of the month.

This sheet asks for yield on every ingredient and applies it automatically. Set flour to 100% and salmon to 62%, and every recipe using them reprices itself correctly. Change a pack price once and the whole menu updates.

What it does

Ingredients — enter the pack size, pack cost and yield you actually buy. It derives the true usable cost per gram, millilitre or unit.
Unit conversion built in — kg, g, lb, oz, L, ml, fl oz, gallon, each, dozen. Buy in sacks, cook in grams.
Recipes — one line per ingredient, costed instantly against the true usable cost.
Menu — recipe cost, cost per portion, food cost % and gross profit per dish.
Set your own target food cost %. Any dish over it turns red; anything at or under turns green.
60 ingredients, 80 recipe lines, 30 menu items — enough for a real menu.

A worked example, from the file itself

Line	Qty	True cost
Salmon side — $22/kg at 62% yield	180 g	$6.39
Olive oil — $38 per 5 L	15 ml	$0.11
Butter — $42.50 per 5 kg	20 g	$0.17
Plate cost		$6.67
Menu price $28.00 → food cost		23.8%
Gross profit per plate		$21.33

Every figure above is calculated by the spreadsheet, not typed in.

Next: which dishes actually earn their place

Accurate plate costs are the input. Menu engineering is what you do with them — sorting every dish by popularity and contribution margin into Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles and Dogs, each with a different action.

There’s a separate free sheet for it, and it uses the proper 70% popularity threshold rather than the “above average” shortcut that quietly mislabels good dishes: the free menu engineering template →

Baking at home rather than running a kitchen?

The same maths, aimed at a different problem: what to charge for a cake when your own time is the biggest cost. The free cake pricing calculator →

Then watch the number that decides everything

Plate costs tell you about a dish. Prime cost — food plus labour as a share of sales — tells you about the business, and it is the figure most operators track weekly. There’s a free tracker for it, built around true COGS rather than purchases alone: the weekly prime cost tracker →

How to use it in Google Sheets

Download the file, then in Google Sheets choose File → Import → Upload. Formulas, drop-downs and conditional formatting all carry across.

Common questions

What food cost % should I aim for?

Full-service restaurants commonly target 28–35%, but it varies enormously by concept — pizza runs far lower, steak and seafood far higher. Set your target in the sheet; it flags against that, not an average.

Where do I get yield percentages?

Weigh it. Buy the item, weigh what you actually plate, divide. It takes one service to do and it’s the single most valuable number in this whole spreadsheet.

Can I use it for catering or a food truck?

Yes — nothing in it assumes a restaurant. Any operation that turns purchased ingredients into priced portions works the same way.

Is anything I type sent anywhere?

No. It’s a file on your computer. This site has no trackers, no analytics and no cookies.

If you’d rather not do this for forty dishes

Everything on this page is free and stays free — the calculator, the spreadsheets, all of it. But costing a whole menu properly is roughly a day’s work, and most kitchens never find the day.

The Menu Profitability Teardown is that work done for you: every dish costed at true yield rather than invoice price, contribution margin in dollars per dish rather than food cost percentage alone, a Kasavana–Smith classification using the proper 70% popularity rule, and a specific list of what to reprice, what to re-engineer and what to cut. You also get the spreadsheet it was built in, so you can rerun it yourself next season. What the teardown covers →

It is a paid service, and the free tools above are not a trial of it — they stay exactly as they are whether or not you ever get in touch.