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Every free recipe-costing template does the same sum: add the invoice prices, divide by servings, multiply by a number the sheet calls "profit margin". Five things go wrong in that one line, and the five are this book. First, you pay for the whole onion and cook with the peeled one. A 5 kg sack of onions at $4.50 is $0.90 a kilo on the invoice and $1.02 a kilo in the pan at 88% yield — 13.6% more, on one ingredient, before anything else is wrong. Yield is per-ingredient, not one global "waste %" row: your trim is not an average, so the book gives every line its own yield column and tells you to measure it.
Second, units. A recipe says "1 cup"; the invoice says "per kilogram". Weight↔weight and volume↔volume are exact and the book carries the 14-unit lattice from the definitions with the source printed beside it. Weight↔volume is not exact — it depends on what the ingredient is — and the book refuses to invent it. There is no hidden "1 cup of flour = 120 g" anywhere: a cross-dimension line asks you for your own measured factor and says so on the sheet until you supply it. A template that quietly divides by 16 or by 1000 is not converting, it is guessing on your behalf.
Third, sub-recipes. The sauce you make in a batch goes into five dishes. One-sheet templates cannot say that, so you either retype the sauce into every dish and update none of them when butter moves, or you guess. Here a batch prep is a first-class row: its lines cost like any recipe, its batch yield turns that into a cost per millilitre or gram, and any dish can then use it as an ingredient. One nesting level, and a Check enforces it — a sub-recipe inside a sub-recipe is how spreadsheets get circular references that fail differently in every engine, so the limit is printed rather than silent.
Fourth, margin is not markup, and the genre confuses them by name. On a plate costing $3.80, "30%" means $5.43 if it is a contribution margin and $4.94 if it is a markup — $0.49 apart on one dish, every service, all year. The Menu Pricing sheet computes both paths side by side, names them, and then does the part templates skip: real menu prices end in .50 or .95, so it takes the price you actually chose and prints what it achieves — food-cost %, contribution margin in money, margin % and markup % on that plate. In the shipped example, a dish costing $2.11 a serving prices at $7.03 by one path and $7.61 by the other; at the price the example charges it returns 26.5% food cost, $5.84 of contribution and a 276.8% markup.
Fifth, knowing a dish costs $2.11 says nothing about whether it belongs on the menu — that takes contribution margin against popularity across the whole sales mix. The Menu Mix sheet does the published Kasavana menu-engineering classification (stars, plowhorses, puzzles, dogs) with both thresholds computed from your own numbers: the popularity line from the item count, the margin line as your sales-weighted average. In the shipped example that puts the threshold at 23.3% and the average contribution at $4.48 — and it makes the point templates cannot: the dish that sells the most there is not the star. Price Watch closes the loop, taking a supplier's new price (15% on one ingredient in the example) through the price book and the sub-recipes to the dishes it actually hits, worst first.
What the book will not do is print folklore. It prints no benchmark food-cost percentage as guidance — the "28–35%" figure the free templates repeat is named once on the Rates sheet, and only to record that they cite nothing for it; it carries no delivery-platform fee table, because those are per country and per contract; it carries no density table, no nutrition, no stock counts and no payroll. The Rates & Sources sheet lists every definition it does use with its document, URL and capture date (2026-09-05), and states in plain sentences what the book refuses to compute and why. Nothing in it expires: there is no tax year here, no jurisdiction and no rate that a government changes in April.
What you get
- Per-ingredient AP→EP yields, not one global waste row — the shipped example's onions cost $0.90 a kilo as purchased and $1.02 a kilo as used, a 13.6% difference the free genre never shows you
- Batch sub-recipes as first-class rows: cost the sauce once, use it in any dish, and every dish moves when its ingredients do — one nesting level, enforced by a live Check
- Both pricing paths, named correctly: target food-cost % and target contribution margin side by side, plus what your chosen menu price actually achieves — food-cost %, contribution in money, margin % and markup %
- Menu engineering on your own sales counts (stars, plowhorses, puzzles, dogs) with the popularity and margin thresholds computed from your mix, not hardcoded
- An exact 14-unit conversion lattice from the published definitions — and an honest refusal to guess weight↔volume, which depends on the ingredient and belongs to your kitchen
- Any currency, any country, no expiry: one symbol set on the first tab, no tax rules anywhere, and 16 live self-checks that go red on your own data before a wrong price reaches a menu
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What's inside
Questions
Which currency and which country is this for?
Any and none. You set one currency symbol on Start Here and every money cell on all 9 sheets follows it — there is no second place to change. The book contains no tax rate, no VAT, no jurisdiction and no legal rule, because recipe costing has none: the same arithmetic serves a café in Lyon, a food truck in Austin and a home baker in São Paulo. Menu prices in some countries are quoted with tax included; the book prices from cost and says so, and adding tax to a displayed price is a decision it leaves to you rather than guessing your jurisdiction.
What is AP → EP, and why does it change my costs?
As-purchased is what the invoice charges; edible portion is what reaches the plate after peeling, trimming, boning or draining. You pay for one and cook with the other, so the true cost per usable gram is the invoice cost divided by your yield. In the shipped example a 5 kg sack at $4.50 is $0.90 a kilo as purchased and, at 88% yield, $1.02 a kilo as used — 13.6% higher — and the same gap compounds through every dish that onion touches. Free templates offer at best one global "waste %" for a whole recipe, which is the wrong shape: fish and flour do not lose the same fraction. The book gives every ingredient its own yield column and tells you to measure yours, because a published average is not your knife.
Does it convert cups to grams?
Only where that is honest. Weight↔weight and volume↔volume conversions are exact definitions and the book carries 14 units in a lattice printed with its source on Rates & Sources. Weight↔volume is not a conversion at all — it is a density, and it belongs to the ingredient: a cup of flour and a cup of honey do not weigh the same. So a line that crosses dimensions asks for your own measured factor and shows a status until you give it. This is deliberate: templates that publish a single "1 cup = 120 g" table are wrong for most of what you cook, and quietly.
How do sub-recipes work, and why only one level?
A sub-recipe is a batch prep — a sauce, a dough, a stock. You cost its lines like any recipe and give it a batch yield (say 4 litres), and the sheet turns that into a cost per millilitre. Any dish can then draw on it as if it were an ingredient, so a supplier price change moves the sauce and every dish that uses it in one recalculation. Nesting is limited to one level and a Check enforces it: a sub-recipe inside a sub-recipe is exactly how a spreadsheet acquires a circular reference, and circular references behave differently in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. The limit is printed on the sheet rather than discovered by you.
What is the difference between margin and markup, and why does it matter here?
A markup multiplies cost; a margin is a share of the selling price. Applied to the same plate, the two produce different prices — on a $3.80 dish, "30%" is $5.43 as a margin and $4.94 as a markup, $0.49 apart on every single service. Most free templates ask for a "profit margin %" and then apply it as a markup, so the price they hand you is not the one you asked for. This book computes both paths, labels them, and then prints what your actual chosen price achieves on all four measures, so the number you charge and the number you meant can be compared instead of confused.
What is menu engineering and where do the thresholds come from?
It is the published method of classifying dishes by contribution margin against popularity — stars sell well and contribute well, plowhorses sell well and contribute little, puzzles contribute well and sell rarely, dogs do neither. The Menu Mix sheet computes both thresholds from your own data: the popularity line from the number of items on the menu, the margin line as your sales-weighted average contribution. Nothing is hardcoded, so the classification changes when your menu or your sales change. Rates & Sources carries the attribution and the URL with the date it was captured (2026-09-05); where the literature's exact wording could not be verified word for word, the sheet says so and lets you set the threshold yourself.
Will it tell me what my food cost percentage should be?
No, and that is on purpose. The "28–35%" line printed by free templates is folklore reprinted without a source; your target depends on your rent, your labour, your format and your market, and a spreadsheet that hands you someone else's number is doing you no favour. The book takes YOUR target — as a food-cost % or as a contribution margin, whichever you think in — and shows the price it implies and the price you actually charge, side by side. Delivery-platform fees are the same: they differ per country and per contract, so they are a percentage you type with a dated note, never a table we invent.
How do I know the arithmetic is right?
The workbook is checked against a separate implementation of the same rules, written independently, and the comparison runs on every build: 32 scenarios typed through the real input cells — yields at their edges, $0 ingredients, a 10,000-unit pack used a quarter at a time, one sub-recipe feeding several dishes, a dish that is only a sub-recipe, zero-sales items in the mix, a chosen price below cost (which prints a negative contribution honestly rather than clamping it to zero) — and 1,383 cell-by-cell comparisons with 0 mismatches. The file is then recalculated in LibreOffice as shipped and with every input cleared, both with zero errors. Beyond that, 16 live checks run inside your copy on your own data.
Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers?
Excel 2016 and newer, Excel 365, Excel for Mac, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. Only classic functions are used — SUM, SUMIF, SUMPRODUCT, IF, INDEX, MATCH, COUNTIF, RANK and their neighbours — with no macros, no add-ons and no external links, so every engine computes the same numbers. A short PDF in the download walks through uploading it to Google Sheets. Apple Numbers opens .xlsx files but rewrites some formulas on import, so it is not one of the tested engines.
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Recipe Cost & Menu Pricing Spreadsheet — yields, sub-recipes and menu engineering · any currency
For people who sell food. The genre hands you one sheet that divides invoice cost by servings; this book costs every ingredient from as-purchased to edible-portion, lets a batch sauce be an ingredient in every dish that uses it, prices each plate two ways and names them correctly — target food-cost % and target contribution margin, not the markup the templates call margin — then classifies the whole menu from your own sales counts. No tax rules, no country: 9 linked sheets of arithmetic in whatever currency you set on the first tab.
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- What you need: Excel 2016+ · Excel 365 · Excel for Mac · Google Sheets · LibreOffice
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- 9 sheets · 1,455 formulas
- Formats: .xlsx (Excel 2016+, Google Sheets) + PDF guide
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