Food cost is what the ingredients in one meal cost you, as a share of what you charge for it. Add your ingredients below, enter the price the customer pays, and the calculator returns the cost per meal, the percentage, and what is left over. On our own kitchens the target sits at 24%; above roughly 35% a prepaid meal line stops paying for itself.
Enter the amount used per meal, not per pack. If a 5 kg bag of chicken costs 60 and one meal uses 0.15 kg, enter 0.15 and 12 (the price per kg).
Leave labour and delivery at zero if you only want the pure ingredient number.
| Ingredients | 0.00 |
| Packaging | 0.00 |
| Kitchen labour | 0.00 |
| Delivery | 0.00 |
| Total cost per meal | 0.00 |
| Contribution per meal | 0.00 |
Under 25% — the ingredient side is working. Look at labour and delivery next, because that is usually where a prepaid line actually leaks.
25% to 35% — workable, but thin. Every price rise from a supplier lands straight on your margin, and you have no room to run a promotion.
Over 35% — the recipe or the price is wrong. Raising the price by a little is almost always easier than cutting a third out of the ingredients, and customers on a weekly prepaid plan notice a worse meal faster than they notice a slightly higher bill.
One number this calculator does not include: waste. If you throw away one meal in twenty, your real food cost is about 5% higher than what you see above.
What counts as a good food cost percentage for a meal prep business — the benchmarks, and why the restaurant numbers do not transfer.
How to price meal prep meals in a prepaid model — pricing upward from cost instead of downward from a competitor's menu.
Pricing calculator — once you know the cost, this turns it into a per-meal, weekly and monthly price.
Kitchen capacity calculator — how many of these meals a day your kitchen can actually produce.
Flambia System tracks this automatically: two-layer food cost, realised against target, per dish and per production day.
