Menu Price Calculator

Pricing a dish by feel leaves money on the table. This calculator flips the food-cost formula around: instead of checking a price you already set, it tells you what to charge to hit the food cost percentage you're aiming for.

Enter what a single serving costs you to make (your plate cost) and the food cost percentage you want to run. The calculator returns a menu price and a markup multiplier — a quick "×" you can apply to any dish's plate cost to price it consistently across the menu. Already have a price and want to check it? Run it through the food cost percentage calculator.

The rule of thumb

A common starting point is to target roughly a 30% food cost, which works out to pricing dishes at about three times their ingredient cost. Treat that as a starting point, not a law: adjust upward for labor-intensive dishes and downward for high-volume items where a lower margin is fine because you sell so many.

Don't price on ingredients alone

The plate cost doesn't include labor, rent, utilities, or waste. The food-cost target is designed to leave room for all of that plus profit — which is exactly why pricing at cost-plus-a-little quietly sinks restaurants. To see how much room you actually have after every cost, use the profit margin calculator, and to find the sales you need to cover fixed costs, the break-even calculator.

The "charm price" simply snaps your calculated price to the nearest .95 ending — a common menu-psychology tweak. Benchmarks are typical US ranges, not guarantees.