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Menu pricing calculator

Put in what a plate costs you, the food-cost percentage you aim for, and the price on your menu today. You get a suggested price, the gross margin you keep, and what a small price change is worth over a year.

What it does: arithmetic, shown in full. Every number on this page comes from the four figures you type, and you can open the working for each one.

What it does not do: it does not know your labour, rent, waste, local competition or what your regulars will accept. Food-cost percentage is one input into a pricing decision, not the decision. Nothing you type leaves your browser — there is no server call on this page.

One menu item

Use the same currency throughout. Plates per week is optional — without it you still get the per-plate figures.

Food cost per plate Ingredients for one serving, including garnish

Target food cost Most full-service kitchens aim somewhere between 25% and 35%

Price on the menu today What the customer pays now

Plates sold per week Optional — needed for the annual figures

Price change to test Try a small move, up or down, e.g. 0.50 or -0.25

How the numbers are worked out

Suggested price

Food cost divided by your target food-cost percentage. A plate costing $4.20 against a 30% target gives 4.20 ÷ 0.30 = $14.00. That is the price at which food is exactly 30% of the ticket for that item.

Gross margin

Price minus food cost, in money and as a percentage of the price. It is what is left to pay for everything that is not the ingredients. It is not profit.

Annual impact

Plates per week × 52 × the change in gross margin per plate. It assumes you keep selling the same number of plates, which is exactly the assumption a price rise tests.

Break-even volume

If you raise the price, you can sell fewer plates and still end up with the same gross profit. The calculator shows how far sales could fall before you are back where you started: old margin ÷ new margin. Raising a $13.00 plate with a $4.20 cost by 50 cents means you could sell about 5% fewer and break even.

What this deliberately ignores

Labour, rent, utilities, card fees and waste. Gross margin is the number before all of that.
How the item sits next to the rest of the menu — anchors, decoys and the item people compare it with.
Whether the plate is one people order because it is cheap. Raising the price of a traffic-driver behaves differently from raising a specialty.
Local competition, portion size and what your regulars will actually pay.

Run one item at a time. The plates worth starting with are usually the ones that sell often and earn least.

Want this run across the whole menu?

This calculator handles one item at a time, with numbers you supply. MenuGenie reads a whole menu and gives you a category breakdown and item-level pricing notes. There is a free analysis on the homepage — no card needed — and a paid report if you want every item written up.

Try the free menu analysis