The Recipe Cost Calculator turns the messy question of “what does this dish actually cost me?” into a precise number. You enter what you bought — the pack price and pack size of each ingredient — and what the recipe uses, and it returns the total batch cost, the cost per serving, a per-ingredient cost breakdown, and a suggested selling price. It is built for anyone who needs to price food honestly: home cooks on a budget, meal-preppers, market-stall and home bakers, supper-club hosts, food trucks, and small cafe owners costing a menu.
How it works
Supermarkets sell ingredients in packs, but recipes use fractions of those packs, so the real cost of a dish is rarely obvious. This tool bridges the gap. For each ingredient it works out the unit price — the cost of a single gram, millilitre or item — by dividing the pack price by the pack size converted to a base unit. It then multiplies that unit price by exactly how much your recipe uses. Because it understands unit families, you can buy mince by the kilogram and use it by the gram, or buy oil by the litre and use it by the tablespoon, and the conversion is handled for you.
Two details make the figure trustworthy. First, yield adjustment: ingredients like onions, carrots or whole fish have peel, trim or bone you pay for but discard, so setting a yield below 100% raises that ingredient’s effective cost to match reality. Second, a cost-share bar under each row shows what fraction of the total each ingredient represents, instantly revealing where your money goes — often one or two items dominate. Add a target food-cost percentage and the calculator suggests a selling price for both a single serving and the whole batch.
Example
A four-serving Bolognese uses a 500 g pack of mince at 5.50, two tins of tomatoes, 200 g of onion (at 90% yield), 30 ml of olive oil from a 1 L bottle, and 400 g of spaghetti from a 500 g pack. The tool adds the lines to a total batch cost of around 8.00, which is 2.00 per serving. At a 30% target food cost, the suggested menu price is about 6.70 per serving. The cost-share bars show the mince is the single biggest line — useful to know before you scale the recipe up for a crowd.
| Ingredient | Pack | Recipe uses | Line cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minced beef | 5.50 / 500 g | 500 g | 5.50 |
| Chopped tomatoes | 0.55 / 400 g | 800 g | 1.10 |
| Onion (90% yield) | 0.90 / 1 kg | 200 g | 0.20 |
| Olive oil | 4.00 / 1 L | 30 ml | 0.12 |
Every figure is calculated in your browser, and your recipe is auto-saved locally so it is waiting for you next time. Use the Copy summary button for a quick paste, or Export CSV to open the full breakdown in a spreadsheet.