Recipe costingEscandallo, in Spanish kitchens

In restaurants it’s done per dish: each ingredient with its gross weight, the loss from trimming or cooking, its purchase price and the resulting cost per portion. The total, divided by the selling price before tax, gives the food cost percentage: the figure used to decide whether a dish is profitable or the recipe, the portion or the price needs to change.

A recipe cost is a snapshot: it stops being valid when an ingredient’s price goes up. Kept by hand in a spreadsheet, it’s almost never current. Connected to purchasing, it recalculates with every delivery and warns when a dish drops below the set margin. The same sheet serves to declare allergens, because it already lists every ingredient.