Food cost by cuisine
Bakery food cost percentage
The format where the food cost percentage is least informative. A croissant's ingredients are pennies; the product you are actually selling is three days of a laminator's attention.
This is the numbers page
Bands, one plate costed to the packaging, and the commodities that plate is exposed to. No general costing advice — that lives in the guides, and the two most relevant to a bakery are linked at the foot of this page.
The cost structure of a bakery
Planning conventions, not research findings — the ranges an operator budgets against. Use them to sanity-check your own arithmetic, never as evidence about the industry.
| Food cost | 22–28% |
|---|---|
| Labour | 34–42% |
| Prime cost target | 60–68% |
| Implied by the two bands above | 56–70% |
The target is 2 points tighter than the two bands added together, which is the real operating constraint: run both food and labour at the top of their ranges and a bakery misses its prime cost ceiling. One of the two has to sit below its high end all year, and which one is a strategy choice rather than an accident.
Flour, butter, sugar and eggs are cheap enough that a single viennoiserie item can run under 15% food cost, but the band sits higher because a bakery's counter carries sandwiches, coffee and cakes with far heavier inputs. The labour band is the highest on this page and it is not a symptom of inefficiency — lamination, proofing and decorating are the product. A bakery managing to a food cost target instead of a prime cost target is managing the smaller half.
One plate, costed line by line
Retail counter price for a single all-butter croissant, sold to go. Line prices are inputs we chose — plausible mid-2026 wholesale figures, not quotes. Replace them with yours and every number below recalculates on the same arithmetic.
| Line | Portion | Cost | Share of plate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bread flourtrackedFrom a batch of 24 at 3.4 lb of flour per batch. | 2.3 oz | $0.08 | 12% |
| Butter, lamination and doughtrackedThe single largest line, and the reason this is not a margarine croissant. | 1.4 oz | $0.39 | 60% |
| Whole milktracked | 0.5 oz | $0.02 | 3% |
| Yeast, sugar, salt | per unit | $0.04 | 6% |
| Egg washtrackedOne egg washes roughly seven croissants. | 0.15 egg | $0.05 | 8% |
| Bag, tissue | 1 unit | $0.07 | 11% |
| Plate cost | $0.65 | ||
Food cost
13.1%
$0.65 ÷ $4.95
Contribution margin
$4.30
per plate sold
Against the band
Below the planning band.
band 22–28%
It lands far under the band, and that is the finding rather than a mistake. When a costed item comes out at little more than half the band's lower edge, the percentage has stopped being a useful control — the number that decides whether this item is worth making is how many of them one baker produces per hour.
What the last 12 months did to this plate
A model, not a measurement: the lines above that map to a tracked commodity, repriced to what they would have cost a year ago if each had moved exactly with its Bureau of Labor Statistics series. Untagged lines are held flat. Real invoices move by more or less than a national average — this shows which lines carry the risk, not what you paid.
| Line | Tracked series | 12-month move | A year ago | Today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bread flour | Flour | −2.5% | $0.08 | $0.08 |
| Butter, lamination and dough | Butter | −18.2% | $0.48 | $0.39 |
| Whole milk | Milk | +3.6% | $0.02 | $0.02 |
| Egg wash | Eggs | −39.2% | $0.08 | $0.05 |
| Whole plate, modelled | $0.77 | $0.65 | ||
| Food cost at $4.95 | 15.6% | 13.1% | ||
Tracked lines moved this plate by −$0.12 over twelve months — a saving you keep on every one sold, unless the menu price moved with it. Series and methodology on the index methodology page.
Three traps specific to this format
1
Managing a labour business with a food cost number
A 12% croissant and a 32% sandwich sit on the same counter, and the blended percentage tells you which one sold rather than which one earns. For a bakery the honest control is prime cost and output per labour hour — the labour cost calculator puts a number on the half a food cost percentage never sees.
2
Shrink treated as a rounding error
Unsold bread is 100% loss on an item you paid full labour to make, and a bakery's day ends with inventory that cannot be carried. A 12% end-of-day shrink on a 15% food cost item does more damage than doubling the price of the flour. Log it as waste daily or it never appears anywhere.
3
Butter substitution decided by price alone
Standard 80% butterfat and European-style 82–86% are different ingredients, not a swap, and lamination behaves differently between them. A switch made on a price sheet can cost more in failed batches than the price gap saved — cost the failure rate, not just the pound.
What a bakery is exposed to
Of the ten commodities we track from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, these are the ones that decide this format's food cost. Prices are US city averages, monthly, and we publish nothing that is estimated rather than measured.
Butter
$3.92/lb
−18.2% over 12 months
The largest single line in viennoiserie and the one with a genuine annual pattern: butterfat demand peaks into Q4 baking season, which is exactly when a bakery's volume peaks too. This is the one commodity here worth contracting rather than buying spot.
Butter prices and menu impact →Flour
$0.54/lb
−2.5% over 12 months
The base of everything and small per unit, but a bakery buys it by the pallet — the only format on this page where a flour move is worth acting on rather than noting.
Flour prices and menu impact →Eggs
$2.19/dozen
−39.2% over 12 months
Washes, custards, enriched doughs and anything on the brunch counter. The most volatile of the ten tracked series by a wide margin, and the reason an egg-heavy counter needs recosting more often than a bread-only one.
Eggs prices and menu impact →Milk
$4.31/gal
+3.6% over 12 months
Doughs, custards and the coffee programme that most bakery counters now run alongside the pastry case.
Milk prices and menu impact →Our plate is a worked example. Yours is the one that pays the rent.
Photograph your menu and every dish comes back costed from your own supplier invoices — the same line-by-line arithmetic as the table above, recomputed the day a price moves, with the invoice line attached to the dish it changed.