You’ve priced a dish on a guess before. You picked a number that felt about right, and only found out later, once GST and the real cost of every ingredient were factored in, that the margin barely existed. A menu price built on instinct is hard to walk back once customers are used to paying it. Our recipe calculator works out your true food cost, your GST-inclusive cost, and your profit margin before the dish goes anywhere near a menu.
WHAT IS A RECIPE CALCULATOR?
A recipe calculator works out what a dish costs to make and what it needs to sell for to turn a profit. Some tools under that name are really a recipe converter, turning ounces and teaspoons into metric, or a recipe multiplier that scales quantities up or down, or a nutrition calculator returning the energy and carbohydrate count per serve. Ours is a recipe cost calculator. Enter your ingredient costs and servings, and you get a total cost, a cost per serve, and the margin behind your selling price.
HOW TO USE OUR RECIPE CALCULATOR
Enter your recipe name, method and serving size, and the number of servings the recipe makes.
Select “+ Add Ingredient” to build your ingredient list, then enter the quantity purchased and cost of goods for each item.
Enter the quantity your recipe actually uses for each ingredient, in grams, millilitres or each.
Select Calculate to see your total cost across the batch, plus the same figure with GST added and your cost per serve. This is where the calculator divides your total batch cost by your number of servings, converting it into a cost per portion.
Enter a Selling Price per serve to see your Food Gross Profit, Food Markup percentage and Total Generated Profit.
WHY FOODSERVICE BUSINESSES USE OUR RECIPE CALCULATOR
Cafes and quick service kitchens change their menus often, and costing a new dish properly before it launches matters more than costing it quickly. Catering and events businesses price the same recipe at different scales throughout the year, a function for ten one week and an event for two hundred the next. Enter the servings for each job, and the calculator handles that recipe scaling without you reworking your ingredient list from scratch.
Bakeries producing large batches need to know the per-unit cost still holds as bakery ingredient prices shift. Contract caterers working to a fixed per-meal budget, such as aged care or education providers, can check a recipe against that budget before it goes into a wider meal planner or seasonal menu.
Across all of these, the value is the same. You get a cost per serve and a margin you can trust, built from your actual supplier pricing rather than an estimate.
Browse our recipes for menu inspiration, then cost them here before you commit to a price.
WHAT MAKES OUR RECIPE CALCULATOR DIFFERENT
Most recipe cost calculators are standalone software with no link to where you actually buy. Ours sits within Goodman Fielder Food Service, a foodservice supplier. Once you’ve priced a recipe and know your numbers, you’re already talking to the team that supplies the ingredients themselves. If a margin looks tighter than expected, that’s a conversation about ingredient pricing you can have straight away.
If you want to work through pricing on a specific dish or menu, our team can help. Get in touch today.
Slow-cooked pork & fennel, celeriac salad on QBA Ciabatta Rolls
Method
Step 1:
Preparing the pork: Coat the boned pork shoulder with olive oil, then massage in fennel seeds and pepper. Turn pork over and coat the skin with salt. Place pork on a lined baking tray, add the water, then cover it with foil and place the lid on top. Put the tray in a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees Celsius and cook six hours. Half an hour before cooking time is up, remove the foil and turn the heat up to 220 degrees Celsius. Once the pork has cooked through, remove from oven and allow it to rest for 20 minutes before pulling the meat part.
Step 2:
To prepare the salad: Cut, trim and grate the celeriac and coat it with lemon juice. Finely chop the fresh herbs, starting with the parsley, chives then dill and add them to the salad, following by the Praise Whole Egg Mayonnaise. Mix all of the ingredients together until it is well-combined.
Step 3:
Place the QBA Artisan Ciabatta Rolls on a tray and place them in the oven for six minutes. Once they have warmed up, slice them halfway and stretch them open. Fill the rolls with a generous serving of pulled pork, topped with the celeriac salad.
Is artisan your preferred bread choice but can’t seem to ace the golden, crunch?
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Ingredients
| Ingredient Name | Qty Purchased | Cost of Goods | Qty Used in Recipe | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| each | $ | each | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| kg | $ | kg | $ 0.00 | |
| mL | $ | mL | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| mL | $ | mL | $ 0.00 | |
| each | $ | each | $ 0.00 | |
| each | $ | each | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 | |
| g | $ | g | $ 0.00 |