How do you calculate restaurant food cost percentage?

Cost of goods sold is opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory. Food cost percentage is COGS divided by food sales for the same period, multiplied by 100.

What is the difference between actual and theoretical food cost?

Actual food cost comes from counting: opening plus purchases minus closing. Theoretical food cost comes from recipes: what your dishes sold should have consumed. Actual includes wastage, over-portioning and loss; theoretical does not. The difference between them is the part worth investigating.

Does closing stock reduce my food cost?

Yes. Stock still on the shelf at the end of a period has been bought but not consumed, so it is subtracted from cost of goods sold and carries into the next period as opening stock. Treating purchases as cost is the single most common food-cost mistake.

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Restaurant Food Cost Calculator

Two calculators: your food cost percentage for a period, and the food cost of a single dish. Both show the formula, because a number you cannot reproduce by hand is a number you cannot defend to a chef.

1 · Period food cost (COGS)

Opening inventory (₹)Stock value at the start

Purchases (₹)Bought during the period

Closing inventory (₹)Stock value at the end

Food sales (₹)Same period, net of discounts

2 · Single dish food cost

Total ingredient cost of the dish (₹)All recipe lines at today's rates

Menu price (₹)Excluding GST

The formulas

COGS	opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory
Food cost %	COGS ÷ food sales × 100
Dish food cost %	dish ingredient cost ÷ menu price × 100
Price at a target %	dish ingredient cost ÷ target %

The mistake almost everyone makes

Purchases are not cost. Money spent on stock that is still sitting on your shelf has not been consumed — it is inventory, and it belongs to next month. Using purchases as the numerator makes a month with a big delivery look catastrophic and the following month look brilliant, when nothing about the kitchen changed.

This is why closing stock is subtracted, and why the closing figure becomes next period's opening. Get those two counts right and everything downstream behaves.

Actual vs theoretical food cost

The calculator above gives your actual food cost: what physically left the shelf, whatever the reason. Your theoretical food cost is what your dishes sold should have consumed, at recipe quantities.

Actual includes over-portioning, wastage, spoilage and loss.
Theoretical includes none of them — it is the perfect-kitchen number.
The gap between them is the part worth investigating. A restaurant running 33% actual against 28% theoretical does not have a pricing problem; it has a five-point execution problem.

Most restaurants can produce the actual figure with a calculator and a stocktake. The theoretical figure needs recipes costed at current rates and multiplied by what the POS actually sold — which is the work our leakage guide covers, and what RestroMatrix does daily.

What food cost percentage should you target?

There is no single right answer, and we would rather say so than publish a number that flatters us. A bar runs very differently from a QSR; a thali house differently from a fine-dining kitchen; and rent, labour and delivery commissions all change what a food cost can be while the business still works.

What is universally true: your own trend, measured the same way each period, is more useful than any benchmark. If the method is consistent, a move from 29% to 33% is a real finding regardless of what any industry average says.

Both numbers, every day, without the spreadsheet

RestroMatrix costs your recipes at today's purchase rates, takes the day's sales from your POS, and compares both against your counts — so actual and theoretical sit side by side with the gap named. Keep your POS.

See how it works Leakage calculator