Every number on your Menu rolls up from a few simple building blocks. Understanding them makes it clear why a cost moves when a price or recipe changes.
Ingredients
An ingredient is something you buy, with a purchase price and a unit, for example flour at a price per kilogram. Ingredient prices are the foundation: change one price and every recipe that uses it recosts automatically.
Menu items and recipes
A menu item is something you sell. Its recipe is a list of ingredients with a quantity for each. The item’s cost is the sum of those quantities priced at their current ingredient cost.
Yield
Some recipes lose volume as they cook or get portioned. A yield factor accounts for that, so the cost reflects what actually reaches the plate rather than what went into the pot.
Preps
A prep is a recipe you make in batches and reuse, like a sauce, stock, or dough. A prep has its own cost built from its ingredients, and you can drop it into a menu item as if it were a single ingredient. When the prep’s cost changes, every item that uses it updates too.
Modifiers
Modifiers are optional add-ons and choices, like a size upgrade or an extra topping. They adjust an item’s cost and price for the variations a guest can pick, without you maintaining a separate recipe for each combination.
Conversions
Recipes and purchases rarely use the same units. You might buy by the case but cook by the gram. Conversions translate between purchase units and recipe units so quantities stay accurate as they flow into cost.
Cost, price, and margin
Putting it together:
- Cost is the rolled-up cost of the recipe, including preps, yield, and conversions.
- Sell price is what you charge.
- Margin is the share of the price left after cost, shown as a percentage.
Because everything traces back to ingredient prices, a single price update ripples through preps, menu items, and margins without any manual recalculation.