Food Cost & Margins
Food cost is the number that tells the truth about your restaurant. Revenue lies — a packed Saturday can hide a Tuesday that's bleeding cash. Labor costs fluctuate with the schedule.
But food cost percentage sits there on the page and tells you exactly how much of every dollar you're handing back to your suppliers. The formula is simple. What you spent on food, divided by what you sold.
Most concepts need that number between 28 and 35 percent to survive. The problem is that almost nobody calculates it often enough to catch the drift before it becomes a crisis. These videos cover the real mechanics — how to run the formula, how to price a menu that protects your margins, and what to do when the numbers start moving in the wrong direction.
The Drift Nobody Catches in Time
Here's how it usually goes. You open. The menu gets priced on instinct and a rough sense of what the neighborhood will pay.
For a while, the register fills up and nobody questions the math. Then your chicken supplier raises prices by eight percent. A new prep cook starts overportioning the salmon.
A popular special runs for three weeks and never gets costed. Each one is small. Together they move your food cost from 31 to 37 percent, and you don't notice until the quarterly P&L arrives and the money isn't there.
The fix is boring. Cost your recipes. Update the costs when your invoices change.
Weigh your portions. Calculate food cost weekly, not monthly — monthly is an autopsy. Weekly gives you time to adjust.
The Drift Nobody Catches in Time
Here's how it usually goes. You open. The menu gets priced on instinct and a rough sense of what the neighborhood will pay.
For a while, the register fills up and nobody questions the math. Then your chicken supplier raises prices by eight percent. A new prep cook starts overportioning the salmon.
A popular special runs for three weeks and never gets costed. Each one is small. Together they move your food cost from 31 to 37 percent, and you don't notice until the quarterly P&L arrives and the money isn't there.
The fix is boring. Cost your recipes. Update the costs when your invoices change.
Weigh your portions. Calculate food cost weekly, not monthly — monthly is an autopsy. Weekly gives you time to adjust.
“You don't go broke all at once. You go broke a half-percent at a time.”
The Numbers, the Formulas, and the Operators Who Use Them
258 videosVideos on food cost calculation, menu pricing strategy, margin analysis, and the franchise economics behind the biggest brands in food.
2 videos tagged “Indian”
Biryani Startup !! How To Start Biryani Resturant !! Inside Of Biryani Cloud Kitchen ! Biryani Menu
Chef Dheeraj breaks down the biryani game like someone who's actually run the numbers — portion costs, labor efficiency, the works that separate profitable rice from expensive mistakes. You've got your proteins, your aromatics, your rice ratios, but here's the thing: biryani scales beautifully if you nail your mise and your timing doesn't fall apart when the orders stack up. Cloud kitchen or brick-and-mortar, the math stays the same. Get your cost per portion locked down or you're just making very expensive rice for very patient customers.
Live Chicken Tikka Food Cost Calculation | Chicken Tikka Food Cost Calculation | Recipe Cost
You're watching someone break down chicken tikka costs ingredient by ingredient, portion by portion, because the difference between 28% and 32% food cost is the difference between making rent and not. Dheeraj walks through the math like your life depends on it — because in this business, it does. Every gram of garam masala, every ounce of yogurt, every piece of chicken gets its number, and those numbers don't lie even when your gut tells you the dish is selling.
Every time a supplier raises a price, your recipe costs change. If you're not updating them, your menu prices are fiction. Second: portion control that's enforced, not suggested.
The difference between a 30 and a 36 percent food cost is often one cook who eyeballs the protein instead of weighing it. Scales are cheaper than going under. Third: a waste log that gets used.
Not a punishment system — a diagnostic one. When you know where product disappears, you can fix the cause instead of guessing at it.
The numbers here connect to everything else. Kitchen Systems covers the workflow and prep structures that prevent waste before it happens. When the margins collapse entirely, Restaurant Failures shows you what the end looks like — and why it was usually avoidable.