Why Is My Food Cost So High? A Diagnostic
· 4 min read
A high food cost is almost never one big problem. In order of how often it's the answer: your recipe costs are stale, you're over-portioning, your prices haven't moved with your costs, waste isn't being tracked, comps aren't counted, deliveries aren't checked, and — last and least likely — theft.
The reason food cost feels mysterious is that every plausible cause produces the same symptom: a number that's four points higher than it should be. So work through them in the order below. Each check takes under an hour and each one either finds the money or eliminates a suspect.
1. Your recipe costs are out of date
Start here, because if the recipes are wrong every other number you look at afterwards is measuring your bookkeeping rather than your kitchen.
Worked example · What eighteen months of drift looks like
- Recipe costed at menu launch
- $4.20
- Average supplier increase per delivery cycle
- +1.2%
- Delivery cycles since
- 18
- Actual plate cost today
- $5.21
- Menu price, unchanged
- $15.00
- Food cost you think you're running
- 28.0%
- Food cost you're actually running
- 34.7%
Nobody did anything wrong. The recipe never changed — the invoices did, one point at a time.
The check: recost your ten highest-volume dishes against your last two weeks of invoices. If the new numbers are materially higher, you've found it, and you don't have a kitchen problem — you have a pricing problem. See recipe costing, step by step.
2. You're over-portioning
The most common genuine kitchen cause, and the most invisible, because half an ounce looks like nothing on a plate.
Worked example · Half an ounce, one dish
- Spec
- 6.0 oz protein at $9.40/lb
- Actual, averaged over 20 weighed plates
- 6.5 oz
- Extra cost per plate
- $0.29
- Plates per week
- 200
- Annual cost
- $3,016
On one dish. Across a menu, portioning drift routinely explains a two-point variance on its own.
The check: weigh twenty plates of your top seller at random during service — not while anyone is watching for it. If the average is over spec, you've found real money. And if every cook independently plates over, the spec is wrong, not the cooks; fix the card and the price together.
3. Your prices haven't moved
This isn't a cost problem at all, but it produces an identical symptom. Food cost percentage is a ratio: it rises when the numerator goes up or when the denominator stands still.
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plate cost | $4.20 | $4.62 | $5.08 |
| Menu price | $15.00 | $15.00 | $15.00 |
| Food cost % | 28.0% | 30.8% | 33.9% |
| Contribution | $10.80 | $10.38 | $9.92 |
The check: when did you last change a price? If the answer is more than a year, this is at least part of your answer. See how to raise menu prices — the arithmetic is friendlier than the fear.
4. Waste isn't being tracked
Kitchens consistently underestimate waste until they write it down, at which point the number is usually two to three times the guess.
The check: a clipboard by the bin for two weeks. Four columns — item, rough quantity, reason, initials — and a fixed list of five reasons. It takes fifteen seconds an entry. See waste percentage for the reason codes and what each one points at.
5. Comps and staff meals aren't counted
Real food, no ticket. It lands in COGS and shows up as variance with no explanation attached.
Worked example · What 2% of sales in comps costs
- Annual sales
- $1,250,000
- Comps at menu value, 2%
- $25,000
- Food cost of those comps at 30%
- $7,500
- Annual COGS with no matching sale
- $7,500
The check: pull the comp report by reason and by employee. You're not looking for a culprit — you're looking for whether it's service recovery (an operations signal), staff meals (budget it), or uncapped manager discretion (put a number on it). See comps. Pull the voids report at the same time and split it: anything voided after the ticket fired is a comp under a different name.
6. Deliveries aren't being checked
Short cases you signed for, substitutions you didn't agree to, and price increases nobody queried. All of it becomes your cost the moment the driver leaves.
The check: for two weeks, count every delivery against the invoice before the driver goes, and compare each unit price to the last delivery. See invoice reconciliation for the ten-minute version.
7. Theft — last, and genuinely last
It happens. It is also a minority of food cost variance in most kitchens, well behind the six causes above. Investigating it first costs you a team's trust and usually finds nothing, because the money was going out through portioning and stale recipes the whole time.
The order matters more than the list
| # | Check | Time | Confirms |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Recost top 10 dishes | 1 hour | Whether the problem is real or a data error |
| 2 | Weigh 20 plates | 1 service | Portioning drift |
| 3 | Date of last price change | 2 minutes | Whether costs outran prices |
| 4 | Two-week waste log | 2 weeks | Spoilage and overproduction |
| 5 | Comp report by reason | 20 minutes | Uncounted give-aways |
| 6 | Two weeks of receiving checks | 2 weeks | Short deliveries, silent increases |
| 7 | Everything else | — | What's left |
Before starting, put a number on the size of the problem: theoretical food cost against actual COGS in the variance calculator tells you whether you're chasing one point or four, and a one-point gap does not justify a fortnight of checks.
Steps 1 and 3, running by themselves.
Marji recosts every dish the day an invoice lands and tells you which ones crossed your target — so the two most common causes on this list stop being things you have to go looking for.
Start free →Terms this guide uses
Variance
The dollar gap between theoretical and actual food cost — the money that left without a sale.
Portion control
Keeping served portions equal to specced portions — the difference between the food cost you calculated and the one you get.
Waste percentage
The share of purchased food that is thrown away rather than sold — spoilage, overproduction, errors and returns.
Comps
Food or drink given away — recovery, staff meals, promotions — real cost with no matching revenue.
Price creep
Small, frequent supplier price increases that individually look ignorable and collectively remove several points of margin a year.
Invoice reconciliation
Checking that what you ordered, what arrived, and what you were billed are the same three things.
Spoilage
Product lost to age, temperature or damage before it could be sold.
Read next
Ideal vs. Actual Food Cost: Where the Variance Actually Hides
How to compute theoretical food cost from your POS mix, compare it against actual COGS, and work through the six causes of variance in the order that usually pays.
How to Calculate Food Cost Percentage (With a Worked Example)
The food cost percentage formula, a full worked example on a real burger, the period-level version from inventory, and the four mistakes that make the number wrong.
My Restaurant Isn't Making Money. Where Do I Look?
A structured walk down the restaurant P&L to find where the profit is going — with the arithmetic for how much each lever is actually worth at your volume.