Food cost by cuisine
Pizzeria food cost percentage
Cheap ingredients, expensive hands. A pizzeria is the clearest example of a format where the food cost percentage looks enviable and the labour line decides whether the year works.
This is the numbers page
Bands, one plate costed to the packaging, and the commodities that plate is exposed to. The argument — the argument for why the percentage is low, what to do about the labour half, and a 40-ball dough batch worked through — is in Pizzeria Food Cost: Why 20% Is Normal, and nothing on this page repeats it.
The cost structure of a pizzeria
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 | 30–36% |
| Prime cost target | 52–58% |
| Implied by the two bands above | 48–60% |
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 pizzeria 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, water, salt and yeast cost pennies and leave the kitchen as a $20 item, which is what pulls the food cost band into the high teens. The value is added by a person stretching, topping and watching an oven, so the labour band sits where a full-service restaurant's would and the prime cost lands in ordinary territory. A pizzeria that celebrates a 19% food cost without pricing its labour has measured the wrong half.
One plate, costed line by line
Dine-in menu price for a large single-topping pie in a mid-market US neighbourhood pizzeria. 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 flourtracked397 g of flour at 62% hydration, plus salt and oil — a 650 g ball before proof loss. | 14 oz (0.88 lb) | $0.48 | 11% |
| Yeast, salt, oil, semolinaDough-room consumables, allocated per ball from a 40-ball batch. | per ball | $0.09 | 2% |
| Tomato saucetrackedCanned crushed tomato. The tracked series is field-grown fresh, so use it for direction, not as a quote for a #10 can. | 6 oz | $0.34 | 8% |
| Low-moisture mozzarellatrackedThe tracked cheese series is natural cheddar. Different cheese, same milk-fat market — direction only. | 8 oz | $2.15 | 50% |
| PepperoniRoughly 34 slices of a 14–16 count cup pepperoni. | 2.2 oz | $0.79 | 18% |
| Box, liner, cutter coverOnly paid on the takeaway half of the mix; costed here on every pie so the number is conservative. | 1 pie | $0.46 | 11% |
| Plate cost | $4.31 | ||
Food cost
20.5%
$4.31 ÷ $21.00
Contribution margin
$16.69
per plate sold
Against the band
Inside the planning band.
band 18–24%
The plate lands inside the band, and the cheese line is half of it. That single fact is the whole pizzeria cost strategy: dough is noise, cheese is the position. A 20% move on flour is worth about a dime a pie; the same move on cheese is worth four and a half times as much.
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% | $0.49 | $0.48 |
| Tomato sauce | Tomatoes | +11.7% | $0.30 | $0.34 |
| Low-moisture mozzarella | Cheddar cheese | −5.0% | $2.26 | $2.15 |
| Whole plate, modelled | $4.40 | $4.31 | ||
| Food cost at $21.00 | 20.9% | 20.5% | ||
Tracked lines moved this plate by −$0.09 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
The cheese hand, not the cheese price
An 8 oz spec applied by hand drifts to 9.5 oz on a busy Friday and nobody notices, because the pizza looks better. At the input price above that is roughly a quarter a pie — larger than any realistic flour move, invisible on the P&L, and fixed by weighing twenty pies once. See portion control.
2
Costing the pie and not the box
Packaging is a real line on a format that sells half its volume to go, and it is almost never on the recipe card. Boxes, liners, dips, chilli flakes and napkins ride along on every takeaway order and none of them appear in a food cost percentage built from ingredients alone.
3
Toppings priced as a flat upcharge
A $2.50 add-any-topping price is one price covering ingredients that differ by a factor of five. Mushrooms and prosciutto are not the same decision, and a topping mix that shifts toward the expensive end costs you margin with no menu change at all. Price by tier, or accept the drift knowingly.
What a pizzeria 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.
Cheddar cheese
$5.74/lb
−5.0% over 12 months
Cheese is the largest line on almost every pie and the reason a pizzeria's food cost moves at all. The tracked series is natural cheddar rather than low-moisture mozzarella, but both are milk-fat products competing for the same supply, so treat it as the direction indicator and your invoice as the number.
Cheddar cheese prices and menu impact →Flour
$0.54/lb
−2.5% over 12 months
The base of every item you sell, and small enough in absolute terms that even a violent move is pennies a pie. Worth watching for dough-room budgeting; not worth repricing a menu over.
Flour prices and menu impact →Tomatoes
$2.00/lb
+11.7% over 12 months
Sauce is the third pillar. The tracked series is fresh field-grown tomato and your sauce is canned, so the two diverge — the canned market is smoothed by contract and pack year, while fresh swings hard by season.
Tomatoes 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.