how do restaurants calculate the prices of each dish? Do they accurately do it or just a rough estimate?
In: Economics
I do this on the regular. Let me explain my process.
Produce, seafood, meat etc usually always require some form of processing, so I need to “yield”
everything to cost it accurately. Meaning, I purchase 4540g (10lbs) of potatoes for $1lb, but I peel them and my waste is let’s say 454g (1lb) which is 10%. My yield is 4086g (9lbs), so it actually cost me $10 for 9lbs of usable potatoes which is ends up really costing me $1.11lb. Same steps apply for processing a whole tenderloin, sirloin, fish etc.
Now that I have my usable yield of potatoes I can use that in my recipe/menu item. I go through and do this for every item that I’m using in the dish/recipe (if it will have any waste whatsoever so I can cover my loss on the waste)
I plate my dish for myself to taste it and to weigh out each ingredient. 2g kosher salt, 20ml olive oil, 50g cleaned sirloin etc etc. lets say the total cost
Of my dish is $5.46. Generally speaking, restaurants aim to run no higher than 30% food cost on a dish. However that isn’t always the case as perception of value, expensive ingredients and other things can skew this. As long as the menu as a whole is coming in under 30% usually it’s fine.
At $5.46 my selling price would be:
5.46 divided by 30% = $18.20
Make sense OP?
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