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Free recipe costing spreadsheet template
A recipe costing spreadsheet with the formulas already in it: cost per purchase unit, yield-adjusted edible-portion cost, line cost, plate cost, food cost percentage, and the menu price that hits your target. One worked example, fourteen blank rows, no email wall.
Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice. Free to use, copy and share — including with your own logo on it.
What's in it
- A
- IngredientWhatever you call it on the invoice, so the sheet and the paperwork match.
- B–C
- Pack price and pack quantityThe step most sheets skip: state the pack size in the unit your recipe uses. A 3.5 lb chicken at $2.19/lb is 56 oz for $7.67.
- D
- AP cost per unitCalculated. What you paid, divided by what you got.
- E
- Yield %How much of what you bought reaches the plate. 100 for anything used whole, 85 for peeled potatoes, 60 for a braise.
- F
- EP cost per unitCalculated. The AP cost divided by yield — the correction that separates a real plate cost from an optimistic one.
- G–H
- Qty on plate, line costEdible weight in, dollars out. The bottom block sums these into a plate cost, a food cost percentage and a target price.
The formulas, if you'd rather build your own
Nothing here is proprietary and you shouldn't need our file to get it right. Assuming a header row and data starting on row 2:
| What | Formula |
|---|---|
| AP cost per unit | = pack price / pack qty |
| EP cost per unit | = AP cost per unit / (yield % / 100) |
| Line cost | = EP cost per unit × qty on plate |
| Plate cost | = SUM(line costs) |
| Food cost % | = plate cost / menu price |
| Contribution margin | = menu price − plate cost |
| Price to hit target | = plate cost / (target food cost % / 100) |
The one people get wrong is the second row. Costing the served weight at the purchase price understates most protein and produce lines by 10–25%, and it is the single most common reason a costing sheet says a dish is fine when it isn't.
Questions
- Do I have to give you an email address?
- No. The file downloads directly and there is no form on this page. We would rather you sent the link to another operator than gave us an address.
- Will the formulas actually work?
- Yes. It's a CSV, and Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice all import a cell beginning with = as a live formula. Change a pack price and the plate cost moves. You may need to format the food cost percentage cell as a percentage — spreadsheets can't tell from a CSV.
- Why a CSV rather than an Excel file?
- Because a CSV opens everywhere, including on a phone, and can't carry a macro. The only thing it costs you is cell formatting, which takes about ten seconds to fix and is worth not making you trust a binary from a company you just met.
- How many dishes will it hold?
- It ships with one worked example and fourteen blank rows, which is one dish. Duplicate the sheet per dish, or copy the block down — the formulas are relative and will follow.
- When should I stop using a spreadsheet?
- Roughly when the maintenance exceeds the value: past about 25 dishes, or once supplier prices move more often than you're willing to retype them. We wrote the honest version of that comparison rather than the self-serving one, and it's linked below.
Next: how to cost a recipe, step by step walks the whole method with a worked plate. Spreadsheet vs. software is the honest comparison, including when the sheet wins. And if you'd rather not maintain either, recipe costing software is what the alternative does and doesn't do.