how do restaurants calculate the prices of each dish? Do they accurately do it or just a rough estimate?
In: Economics
I do this for a living. It’s often a combination of the two. The basic methodology for pricing a food item is this:
I want to sell a burger. The burger will have 8oz (raw) of beef, a slice of onion, a slice of cheese, some lettuce and a pickle spear, and obviously a bun. A 60lb case of beef costs $200 (made up number). So you take 60lb/8oz=120 portions, so you divide the price of your case of ground beef by how many portions you get (usually accounting for some amount of loss which varies by business) and that’s how much each burger costs you in beef. Do the sake thing to your buns per case.
Onions are cheap, and lettuce used to be so you can ballpark those pretty easily.
Then you decide how much your food cost (%of what you charge for it that just pays for ingredients) needs to be to keep your overall menu profitable and there you go. It’s not necessarily difficult, but it is extremely tedious when you have a lot of different ingredients on your menu. Certain things like fries are big money makers because potatoes cost nothing, and are delicious, so you can charge a higher proportional amount for them.
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