Food cost by cuisine
Bar & pub food cost percentage
The one format on this page where the headline percentage is a blend of three very different businesses — spirits, beer and wine — plus a kitchen that follows completely different rules.
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 bar are linked at the foot of this page.
The cost structure of a bar
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 | 18–24% |
|---|---|
| Labour | 24–30% |
| Prime cost target | 44–56% |
| Implied by the two bands above | 42–54% |
Both bands can run at their high end and the prime cost ceiling still closes, which is unusual and is this format's structural advantage. It is also why the pressure on a barrarely shows up in prime cost at all — look for it further down the P&L.
A blended pour cost in the low twenties hides an enormous spread: spirits pour in the low teens, draught beer in the mid twenties, wine by the glass higher still. That blend is why a bar's prime cost target is the lowest on this page and why the format survives on a fraction of a restaurant's covers. The mix — not the pour cost — is the number that actually moves, so a bar whose sales shift from cocktails to draught gets more expensive with nothing else changing.
One plate, costed line by line
House gin, 1.5 oz jiggered pour, in a neighbourhood bar rather than a cocktail bar. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| House ginFrom a 750 ml bottle at $17.50 — 25.4 oz, so $0.69 an ounce. | 1.5 oz | $1.03 | 72% |
| TonicPost-mix gun. Bottled tonic is several times this and changes the drink's economics entirely. | 4 oz | $0.26 | 18% |
| Lime wedge | 1/8 lime | $0.09 | 6% |
| Ice, straw, napkin | per drink | $0.05 | 3% |
| Plate cost | $1.43 | ||
Food cost
11.9%
$1.43 ÷ $12.00
Contribution margin
$10.57
per plate sold
Against the band
Below the planning band.
band 18–24%
Well under the band, which is exactly what a spirit pour should do — and precisely why the blended band exists. This drink subsidises the draught line and the wine list. Judge a bar on the blend and on the mix, never on the best drink in the well.
Three traps specific to this format
1
The free pour that is really 1.75 oz
A quarter-ounce over on a 1.5 oz spec is a sixth of your liquor cost, given away one drink at a time. At the input price above that is about seventeen cents a drink; across two hundred of the same drink a week it is roughly $1,800 a year on one well item. See free pour vs jigger and put a number on yours with the pour cost calculator.
2
Kitchen and bar averaged into one number
A pub kitchen runs a 30%-plus food cost and the bar runs half that. Blend them and you get a number that describes neither, moves for reasons you cannot see, and hides a kitchen quietly losing money behind a healthy bar. Track the two prime costs separately or you are flying on an average.
3
Comps and spillage that never reach a report
Buybacks, staff drinks, breakage and a bad keg are all real product leaving the building, and none of them is in a theoretical pour cost. This is the format where variance between theoretical and actual is the entire game, and the only way to see it is to count.
What a bar 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.
Ground beef
$6.89/lb
+10.1% over 12 months
The pub kitchen's headline item on most menus. If the burger is your food volume, this series is the one worth watching, and the kitchen is the half of the business it applies to.
Ground beef prices and menu impact →Cheddar cheese
$5.74/lb
−5.0% over 12 months
Burgers, nachos and everything else the bar menu leans on. Small per plate, and used across enough items that a move shows up in the blended food line rather than in one dish.
Cheddar cheese prices and menu impact →Chicken breast
$4.15/lb
−1.2% over 12 months
Wings and tenders sit on nearly every pub menu. Note the driver on the ingredient page: wing demand spikes can pull whole-bird economics around, which is exactly the item a bar sells most of during a football season.
Chicken breast 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.