Free Tool
Food Cost Calculator
See exactly what food cost drift is costing your restaurant — per week, and per year. Enter your numbers below, no signup required.
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What's drift costing your restaurant?
That's money quietly leaving through spoilage, over-portioning, or unmonitored shrinkage — and it repeats every week the drift goes uncaught.
No credit card required to start. Estimates based on the numbers you enter above.
What is food cost drift?
Every menu is priced around a target food cost percentage — the share of each sales dollar that should go to ingredients. Most independent restaurants target somewhere between 28% and 32%. Drift is the gap between that target and what you actually spent, measured the same way: ingredient cost divided by food sales, for the same period.
A restaurant targeting 30% but running 34% has 4 points of drift. On $50,000 in weekly sales, that's not a rounding error — it's $2,000 gone every single week, $104,000 over a year, quietly leaving through the kitchen door.
What causes food cost to drift above target?
In 40 years of restaurant operations — line cook through VP of Operations — the drift almost always traces back to four things:
Inconsistent scoops, pours, and plate builds. A quarter-ounce over on every pour adds up fast across hundreds of covers a week.
Trim, prep mistakes, and product that gets tossed instead of tracked. If it's not counted, it's not managed.
Ordering off habit instead of a sales forecast leaves excess perishables sitting in the walk-in until they're no longer sellable.
Costs rise gradually and rarely get re-priced into the menu, so the same order that hit target six months ago quietly doesn't anymore.
How is food cost percentage calculated?
The formula is simple: food cost percentage = cost of ingredients used ÷ food sales, for the same period. If a restaurant sells $50,000 in food in a week and the ingredients behind those sales cost $17,000, food cost is 34% ($17,000 ÷ $50,000). The calculator above does this math for you, and compares it against whatever you've set as your target.
Why weekly instead of monthly?
A monthly P&L tells you drift happened three to five weeks after it started — by the time the report lands, the same ordering pattern has already repeated every week in between. Checking weekly catches it while there's still time to fix the actual cause, not just read about it after the damage is done.
That's the entire idea behind RH+ Core: a weekly operational score, ranked priorities, and food cost tracking — built by a 40-year restaurant veteran, not a software company.
See RH+ plans →