1 The menu
2 Dishes
Dish Menu price $ Plate cost $ Cost % Margin $ Flag
Plate cost comes from your recipe costing — trim and waste included. No price yet? Leave it at 0 and the dish waits unflagged until you price it.
Home / Restaurant / Menu Profit Sheet
The whole menu on one page — plate costs, food cost %, margins and what to fix first.
Plate cost comes from your recipe costing — trim and waste included. No price yet? Leave it at 0 and the dish waits unflagged until you price it.
For every dish you need two numbers: menu price and plate cost. Plate cost comes from recipe costing — the Recipe Cost Calculator produces it, and the ⤓ Pull button imports a costed dish from that page in one tap. Everything else is arithmetic the sheet runs for you: food cost % = plate cost ÷ price, and contribution margin = price − plate cost — the dollars a dish actually throws off toward rent and labor every time it sells.
Most full-service kitchens run 28–35%; fast-casual and QSR often sit a few points lower. Watch the menu average against your target, but fix dishes one at a time: a single 45% dish among 30% neighbors drags the average while quietly burning margin on every order.
Each dish is placed against the menu's own averages — price against average price, cost % against average cost %. That yields four positions:
| Flag | Position | The move |
|---|---|---|
| ★ Star | Higher price, leaner cost than menu average | Protect it — feature it, never discount it |
| Volume | Lower price, leaner cost | Good traffic dish; a $0.50 price test adds pure margin |
| Premium | Higher price, heavier cost | Check the plate — portion creep and garnish bloat live here |
| Watch | Lower price, heavier cost | Reprice, recost or replace — margin and traffic both weak |
The classic Menu Engineering Matrix adds sales-mix data (Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, Dogs). Use that when you have POS counts; use this sheet when all you have is a costed recipe list and ten minutes.
No. Prices, costs and the sheet itself live in your browser's local storage — there is no account, no upload and no signup. Print or save to PDF from the browser and the sheet is yours.
Cost each dish (plate cost), then divide each by its menu price to get per-dish food cost %. The menu average is the mean of those per-dish percentages — compare it to your target, usually 28–35% for full service, and fix the dishes that run over one at a time.
Menu price minus plate cost — the dollars each sale contributes toward labor, rent and profit. A $16.50 burger with a $5.30 plate contributes $11.20 every time it sells, regardless of its food cost percentage.
Cost a dish once in the Recipe Cost Calculator — it saves on your device — then hit ⤓ Pull costed recipe here. The dish lands in the table with its plate cost filled; add its menu price and it flags itself. Manual rows work the same way.
For menu-level cost summaries, yes — this sheet totals your costed recipes, flags the pricing risks and prints a one-page report, free and without an account. What it does not do is inventory depletion and purchase tracking; start here and add software only when purchasing becomes the bottleneck.