Food cost: pricing a dish and defending the margin

Food cost is easy to define and almost always used badly. It is the cost of the ingredients against the selling price, and the version that matters is not your restaurant’s overall percentage but the one for each dish. A place running 32% overall can quite happily be losing money on its three best sellers. Here is a recipe card worked line by line, and what you do with it every week.

A recipe card, worked on a tajine

Here is the full calculation for one portion. The purchase prices below are an example to show the method: replace them with your own invoices, which are the only ones that make the result true.

The ingredient	Quantity	Purchase price	Cost in the plate
Chicken thigh and drumstick	350 g	45 MAD per kilo	15.75 MAD
Pitted green olives	40 g	60 MAD per kilo	2.40 MAD
Preserved lemon	20 g	50 MAD per kilo	1 MAD
Onion	80 g	6 MAD per kilo	0.48 MAD
Olive oil	20 ml	70 MAD per litre	1.40 MAD
Spices, garlic, coriander	—	flat	1.20 MAD
Bread	1 unit	1.50 MAD each	1.50 MAD
Food cost of the plate			23.73 MAD

At a selling price of 70 MAD, this dish’s food cost is 23.73 MAD ÷ 70 MAD, that is 33.9%, with a gross margin of 46.27 MAD per plate. Keep both numbers: the percentage is for comparing dishes with each other, the dirhams are what pay the rent.

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The four things that make a food cost drift

The card is accurate the day you write it. What makes it wrong afterwards is always one of these four, in this order of frequency.

• Portion drift: Nobody weighs, and the ladle slowly grows. Twenty grams too much meat on a dish sold a hundred times a week is several thousand dirhams a year. It is the number-one cause and the least visible, because plate by plate it looks like nothing.
• Waste and breakage: Trimmings, burnt food, unsold at close, order errors, staff meals not counted. All of it is food cost that produced no sale, and it stays invisible until it is recorded.
• The purchase price moving: A card calculated in January with chicken at one price and never revisited is a work of fiction by June. That is why purchase prices have to go into the software at goods-in, not from memory.
• The menu mix: Your customers do not order in equal shares. If your two best-selling dishes are also the least profitable, your overall food cost will rise without a single card being wrong.

Building your cards, dish by dish

Allow an hour for your ten best sellers. That is enough: they usually make up the bulk of your takings.

1. List your ten best sellers from your till’s report, not from memory. The list is almost always a surprise.
2. Weigh a real portion of each ingredient, the one the cook actually serves, not the one in the original recipe.
3. Take the purchase prices from your latest invoices, and note the unit: per kilo, per litre, each.
4. Add a flat allowance for spices, cooking oil and the small things nobody weighs. An approximate amount beats an omission.
5. Calculate the cost, the ratio and the margin in dirhams, and write all three on the card.
6. Rank your dishes on two columns: what each earns per plate, and how many you sell. The interesting decisions sit at the intersection.

That ranking is the real deliverable. A low-margin dish you sell three times a week does not deserve your attention; the same dish sold a hundred times is a first-order problem, and often fixable with five dirhams of price or twenty grams of portion.

What complicates the calculation in Morocco

Seasonal prices first. Fresh produce varies sharply through the year, and Ramadan moves both demand and the price of several raw materials at once. A recipe card therefore only means anything if it is dated: note the month of the calculation on the card, and redo your ten main dishes two or three times a year rather than once and for all.

Then cash buying. Some supply comes from the market or a wholesaler with no usable document, and the price paid disappears if nobody notes it. That is where the whole method breaks: without a purchase price there is no food cost, no margin and no possible decision. Get into the habit of entering the quantity and price into the till at goods-in, even without a formal invoice.

The weekly routine, in twenty minutes

The recipe card is a starting point. Repetition is what protects the margin.

• Pull your ten best sellers of the week from the till report and compare with the previous ranking.
• Check two portions at random on the scales, in the middle of service, not quietly in the morning.
• Record the week’s losses: breakage, unsold, errors. It is the line you only reduce after measuring it.
• Check the purchase prices that moved on the three or four heaviest ingredients on your menu.
• Correct one single thing: a price, a portion, or a dish taken off the menu. One a week is what lasts.

Mistakes to avoid

• Only calculating the overall food cost. It will tell you everything is fine until the day nothing is.
• Writing the card from memory instead of weighing what is actually served.
• Forgetting waste. It appears nowhere and is paid for everywhere.
• Thinking in percentage only. A dish at 40% returning forty dirhams beats one at 25% returning fifteen.
• Never refreshing purchase prices. Last year’s card is an opinion, not a calculation.

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Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate a dish’s food cost?

Add up the cost of each ingredient in the portion actually served, converting the purchase price to the quantity used, then divide that food cost by the selling price. On this article’s example, 23.73 MAD of ingredients for a dish sold at 70 MAD gives a food cost of 33.9% and a gross margin of 46.27 MAD.

What is a good food cost in a restaurant?

There is no single good figure: it depends on the type of business, the product category and your cost structure. Drinks are almost always well below dishes, which pulls the average down. Compare your dishes against each other and track each one over time, rather than aiming at a percentage you heard somewhere.

Why is my food cost rising for no reason?

Four causes, in order of frequency: portions have grown, waste is not being recorded, a purchase price rose without the card being revisited, or your customers have shifted towards the least profitable dishes. The first three are checkable in an hour; the fourth is read in the best-sellers report.

Do I have to weigh every portion?

No, but you have to weigh the ones that weigh on the result: proteins and any expensive ingredient. Two random checks a week, mid-service, are enough to hold the drift, and far more effective than an exhaustive check done once and then abandoned.

How do I track food cost without complicated software?

You need three things: your best-sellers ranking, your purchase prices recorded at goods-in, and somewhere to note waste. A till that keeps sales history and cost prices already supplies the first two, and the third is a habit rather than a tool.

What to take away

Food cost is not a percentage to display, it is a decision to take dish by dish. Weigh what you actually serve, take your prices from your invoices, calculate the margin in dirhams as well as the ratio, and cross all of it with how often each dish leaves the pass. The menu then corrects itself: keep what earns, adjust what sells a lot for little, and drop the rest.

Read next

Other practical guides on the same subject:

• POS system for restaurants: the complete 2026 guide
• Stock management step by step: a guide for small shops
• What a cash register really costs in Morocco in 2026
• POS software compared in Morocco 2026: nine systems, honestly reviewed