Free food cost Excel template (with ready-made formulas)
Download the free Excel template to work out the food cost of your dishes: ingredient cost, food cost percentage and margin, with ready-made formulas and a worked example.
If you are looking for an Excel template for food cost, you are in the right place. Here is a free file, already set up with the formulas, to work out what each dish costs you, the food cost percentage and the margin you keep. No sign-up, no catch.
⬇ Download the Food Cost template (Excel, free)
What is inside the file
The template has two sheets, kept simple even if you are not very comfortable with Excel.
The first sheet, Food cost dishes, is the calculator itself. For each dish you type three things: the name, the ingredient cost and the selling price. The file works out the food cost percentage, the margin in euros and also gives you a quick rating (great, on target, review) on its own. You only touch the yellow cells, the rest updates by itself.
The second sheet, Ingredient cost, helps you with the most tedious step: figuring out what an ingredient really costs. You type the pack price and the quantity, and you get the cost per gram, millilitre or piece. You then carry that number over to the first sheet.
How to calculate food cost
The formula is simple:
Food cost % = ingredient cost ÷ selling price
If a dish costs you 3.20 € in ingredients and you sell it for 12.00 € (excluding VAT), your food cost is 3.20 ÷ 12.00, that is around 27%. The gross margin on that dish is 8.80 €. In the file this example is already in the first row: replace it with your own dishes and get going.
One important tip: always use the price excluding VAT, otherwise the calculation is skewed. If you are unsure how to read the real costs from your invoices, we have a guide on how to read a supplier invoice.
What counts as a healthy food cost
There is no single number that works for everyone. In general, below 30% you are in good shape, up to 38% you are on target, above that you should start asking questions. But the bands shift a lot: a pizzeria, a bar and a seafood restaurant have different cost structures. To dig deeper, read what the ideal food cost percentage is.
The most useful thing the template shows you is not the single number, but the comparison between dishes: almost always you find that two or three items on the menu have a much higher food cost than average, and they are often exactly the ones you sell a lot. Those are the first to reprice or rework. To go further, look at which dishes actually make you money.
The limits of the Excel sheet
The template is a great starting point, but it has one flaw that everyone who uses it for a while knows: it has to be updated by hand. Every time a supplier changes prices, you would have to go back into the file and correct the costs, dish by dish. In practice, after a few weeks almost nobody does, and the sheet stops telling the truth.
That is why we built AFLUYO: you photograph your invoices from your phone and the costs update on their own, so food cost and margins stay true without you having to touch the sheet. If the Excel template is useful but keeping it up to date is a drag, try the automatic version: it starts in ten minutes and you can cancel whenever you want.
In the meantime, download the file and start lining up your dishes. Just the five you sell most are enough to see where you are leaving margin on the table.