The Marji Index
Restaurant food cost index
Marji's restaurant food cost index tracks a fixed basket of ten food categories using BLS U.S. city average retail prices and Marji's published weights. It provides market context for kitchens. It is not a BLS index, a wholesale quote, or your restaurant's actual food cost. Data and charts are free to use and cite.
BLS publishes these observations monthly; Marji checks for updates weekly. See the BLS average-price definitions and our basket weights and methodology.
Index · September 2026
109.4
Base January 2024 = 100
- Month over month
- −0.2%
- 3 months
- −0.1%
- 12 months
- −2.5%
- Since base
- +9.4%
Index since 2024-01
What moved
Contribution to the last 12 months of index movement, in index points. This is an attribution, not a list of the biggest percentage movers — a 20% rise in a lightly-weighted category moves the basket less than a 6% rise in a heavy one, which is the whole point of building a commodity index rather than reading ten prices. Each commodity opens its own page.
| Commodity | Basket weight | Latest price | 12-month change | Index points | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eggs · grade A, dozen | 7% | $2.27 /dozen | −34.9% | -3.38 | |
| Ground beef · 100%, lb | 20% | $6.79 /lb | +7.4% | +1.86 | |
| Butter · grade AA, lb | 7% | $3.96 /lb | −17.3% | -1.24 | |
| Bacon · sliced, lb | 7% | $6.76 /lb | −7.3% | -0.57 | |
| Tomatoes · field grown, lb | 9% | $1.99 /lb | +4.3% | +0.34 | |
| Flour · all-purpose, lb | 8% | $0.55 /lb | −3.2% | -0.26 | |
| Coffee · ground roast, lb | 6% | $9.33 /lb | +2.1% | +0.19 | |
| Cheddar · natural, lb | 12% | $6.13 /lb | +1.4% | +0.18 | |
| Chicken breast · boneless, lb | 16% | $4.20 /lb | +0.7% | +0.12 | |
| Milk · whole, gallon | 8% | $4.11 /gal | −0.6% | -0.05 |
Data through September 2026. Prices are US city averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and will differ from what any individual restaurant pays — see methodology.
Built on this index
What it did to your dish
Your portion size and weekly covers against twelve months of measured movement — per plate, per week, per year.
Free chart images
Eleven ready-made charts — the index and each commodity — free to reuse with attribution.
The year in review — one report per completed year
What a full calendar year did to the basket, which commodities did it, and what that was worth on a plate.
The archive — one permanent page per published month
This page changes every month. If you are citing a figure, cite the month you read it in — those pages keep their value, their movers and their date.
Use it. Cite it. Take the data.
Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse the numbers or the charts anywhere, including commercially, with a link back to this page. No permission needed and no form to fill in.
Suggested citation: Marji Restaurant Food Cost Index, September 2026. https://marji.co/food-cost-index
Get it monthly.
What moved, what it does to a typical dish, and one thing worth repricing. One email, no pitch.
What this means for your menu
A national index tells you the direction and the rough magnitude. It cannot tell you what happened to your beef, from your supplier, on your menu — and that's the number that decides whether a dish still clears its target.
A benchmark can help you frame a question about an invoice change. It cannot establish why a supplier changed its price: retail and wholesale channels, product grades, pack sizes and contract terms differ. Compare like-for-like invoice units, check the affected recipe, then decide whether to discuss the quote or review a menu price. More on that in price creep.
Ingredients are only one side of the arithmetic. What guests are paying, what kitchen labour costs and how far the two have diverged are on the restaurant food cost statistics page, computed from the same pipeline with the BLS series identifier printed next to every figure.
Review your own invoice prices and recipe quantities, units and usable yields in Marji before relying on a plate cost or margin. Ongoing costing starts with a free 14-day trial, with no card required; continued costing access requires a paid plan.
When a price change means a new menu price, a free QR menu lets you update it without reprinting.
Recent ingredient cost and pricing guides
Put market changes in context, check a dish with your own costs, and decide how to explain a menu price change.