The Marji Index
Restaurant food cost index
What restaurant food actually costs. A fixed-weight index of the ten commodities independent restaurants buy most, built on US Bureau of Labor Statistics average-price data and weighted for a restaurant basket rather than a household one. Free to use and cite.
Index · July 2026
108.7
Base January 2024 = 100
- Month over month
- −0.7%
- 3 months
- −4.0%
- 12 months
- −2.0%
- Since base
- +8.7%
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% | $2.19 /dozen | −39.2% | -3.91 | |
| Ground beef · 100%, lb | 20% | $6.89 /lb | +10.1% | +2.51 | |
| Butter · grade AA, lb | 7% | $3.92 /lb | −18.2% | -1.31 | |
| Coffee · ground roast, lb | 6% | $9.32 /lb | +10.7% | +0.88 | |
| Tomatoes · field grown, lb | 9% | $2.00 /lb | +11.7% | +0.88 | |
| Cheddar · natural, lb | 12% | $5.74 /lb | −5.0% | -0.63 | |
| Bacon · sliced, lb | 7% | $6.58 /lb | −7.5% | -0.57 | |
| Milk · whole, gallon | 8% | $4.31 /gal | +3.6% | +0.31 | |
| Flour · all-purpose, lb | 8% | $0.54 /lb | −2.5% | -0.20 | |
| Chicken breast · boneless, lb | 16% | $4.15 /lb | −1.2% | -0.20 |
Data through July 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, July 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 yourmenu — and that's the number that decides whether a dish still clears its target.
What it's genuinely good for is telling a market move apart from a vendor move. If your supplier is up 21% and the index is up 19%, that's the market and the answer is repricing the dish. If the index is flat and your invoice isn't, that's a conversation with your rep — and now you have evidence for it. 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.