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Plate cost, food cost and margin

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Plate cost, food cost and margin

A menu tells your guests what they are eating. Behind it, once each dish is linked to a recipe, 1pm shows you whether that menu makes money: the plate cost of each dish, the food cost percentage, and the margin. All of it is planner-only. It lives in the menu builder and never reaches the BEO, the client confirmation, the printed menu, or anything a crew member sees.

This article covers linking a dish to its recipe, reading the numbers on a dish, the menu-level roll-up, the difference between prix-fixe and a la carte, and the line that keeps your costs private.

Linking a dish to a recipe

Open Menus, expand a menu, and edit a dish. Among its fields is Recipe for plate cost, labelled "(only you see the cost)". Pick the recipe that makes this dish, or leave it on Not costed. If you have not built any recipes yet, a link there takes you to start one.

Once linked, the dish's plate cost is its recipe's cost per serving. Nothing else about the dish changes. The name, description, price and dietary tags a guest sees are untouched. You have simply told 1pm what this plate costs you to put out.

Only recipes with a servings yield can be a dish's cost source, and the picker greys out the rest. A recipe that makes a batch, "makes 2 L" of jus or "makes 5 kg" of ragù base, has a cost per litre or per kilo rather than a cost per plate, so it would be the wrong number to put beside a plate. Batch recipes still earn their keep as prep recipes inside the recipe that does plate up: see Building costed recipes.

Reading the numbers on a dish

A linked dish shows a small Plate figure beneath it, for example "Plate $6.50". That is the ingredient cost of one serving.

If the dish also carries its own per head price, the sort you would set on an a la carte menu, two more figures sit alongside it: the food cost percentage and the margin. Food cost percentage is the plate cost divided by the price, the single number most kitchens run their menu by. Margin is the price minus the plate cost, the cash that plate leaves behind to cover everything that is not the food. A $6.50 plate sold at $28 shows a food cost of 23.2% and a margin of $21.50.

A dish priced flat rather than per head, a grazing table at $250 or a platter for the whole table, still shows its plate cost, but no percentage. The plate cost is for one serving and the price is for the whole thing, so dividing one by the other would give you a food cost that falls the bigger the table gets. Tick Per head on the dish and the two figures appear.

If a dish is linked but its recipe cannot be costed yet, 1pm says so and points you at the missing ingredient prices, rather than showing a misleading number.

Prix-fixe and a la carte

How the numbers roll up depends on how the menu is priced.

  • A prix-fixe menu has one set price per head. Individual dishes are not priced. Here the food cost and margin are worked out at the menu level, adding up the plate cost of every course and comparing it to that single price. If you have priced the menu flat instead of per head, you still get the total plate cost per head, but no percentage, for the same reason a flat-priced dish does not get one.
  • An a la carte menu prices each dish separately. Here every dish carries its own food cost and margin, and the menu level only totals the plate cost, since the per-dish figures already tell the story.

You do not choose between the two settings on purpose. It follows from whether you set a menu price or price the dishes.

The menu roll-up

Below the dishes, once at least one is linked to a recipe, a small panel headed with "Only you see this. Never shown to clients." gathers the whole menu's numbers:

  • Total plate cost, the sum of every linked, costed dish.
  • On a prix-fixe menu, the Food cost percentage and the Margin per head against the set price, so a $7.52 total against a $34 set price reads as 22.1% food cost and $26.48 margin a head.
  • A count when some linked dishes are not yet costed, for example "2 of 3 linked dishes costed", with a nudge to price the missing recipe's ingredients.

There is no right food cost percentage that 1pm imposes. Kitchens set their own targets, and what is healthy for a plated pasta is different from a prime steak. The panel just puts the real number in front of you so the target is yours to hold.

What clients and crew never see

This is worth stating plainly, because costing only works if you trust it to stay private. Plate cost, food cost, margin, the roll-up panel, and everything on the Ingredients and Recipes pages are internal to you. The printed menu, the BEO, the client confirmation and every shared link show dish names, descriptions, dietary tags and any client-facing prices, and nothing about what the food costs you.

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