Cost your recipe
Enter each ingredient the way it appears on your invoice: what the pack costs, what the pack contains, and how much the recipe uses. Units convert automatically (lb, oz, kg, g, dozen, each). Yield covers trim and shrink. A sample cookie batch is loaded; overwrite it with your own recipe.
| Ingredient | Pack price ($) | Pack size | Unit | Amount used | Unit | Yield % | Cost | Remove |
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Email yourself this costing
We'll send the full breakdown to your inbox so you have it when you price the menu. No spam, no calls unless you ask for one.
How this calculator does the math
Every line runs the same three steps a chef would do on paper. First it turns the pack into a unit cost: a 50 lb bag of flour at $18.60 is $0.372 per pound. Then it multiplies by what the recipe uses: 4 lb of flour is $1.49. Then it corrects for yield, dividing by the usable share, so trim and shrink are paid for by the recipe that causes them. Add the lines, and the sample batch above lands at $38.79 for 48 cookies, which is $0.81 a cookie. At a 30 percent target the math suggests $2.69; sell at $3.00 and you are running 26.9 percent with $2.19 gross profit per cookie.
The unit conversion is the part spreadsheets get wrong most often. You buy cheese by the case, portion it by the ounce, and somewhere in the copy-paste a case price gets treated as a pound price. Here you enter both sides in their own units and the conversion is done for you. For volume measures like cups, convert to weight first; weight is the only measure your invoice and your scale agree on. Yield math has its own guide: what yield is and how to calculate it.
Where the leads, sorry, the profit leaks out
A recipe costing is a photo of one moment. The flour that cost $18.60 this week costs $19.40 after the next vendor letter, and nobody re-opens the calculator. Multiply one silent price change across every recipe an ingredient touches and the menu quietly loses its margin. That is the whole reason Culvana's recipe costing exists as a platform instead of a page: the AI reads each vendor invoice as it arrives, updates ingredient costs, and reprices every affected recipe the same afternoon. This calculator is the manual version of what the platform does automatically, every day, for $199 a location.
Common questions
How do I calculate the cost of a recipe?
Pack price to unit cost, unit cost times amount used, corrected for yield, summed across ingredients. Divide by servings for cost per serving; divide that by your target food cost percentage for a menu price. The calculator above runs all of it.
What if I buy by the case but use by the pound?
Enter the pack as bought and the usage as measured. Pounds, ounces, kilograms, grams, dozens and each convert automatically when both sides are the same kind of measure.
How does yield affect recipe cost?
Divide by the yield percentage to get the true cost of what you serve. $1.20 a pound at 88 percent yield is $1.36 a pound served. There is a yield field on every row.
Can I save or send my costing?
Print it, or email yourself a copy with the form above. If you want costings that stay current on their own, that is the platform's job.
Is this recipe cost calculator free?
Yes, free and unlimited. The math runs in your browser; nothing is stored unless you email yourself a copy.
Cost one of your real recipes with us, live
Book a demo and we will cost an actual recipe from your menu on screen, then photograph one of your invoices and let the AI reprice it in front of you. Work out what the whole platform is worth in the savings calculator, or take your portion costs straight into the menu engineering matrix.