I know. I know. I hear it from you guys all the time. “But I got into cooking because I suck at math”. Yes, yes, that’s nice for you. You still have to have a basic understanding of math to do things properly. There is no way around that, and the more “molecular” the food you want to make, the more numbers you will have to play around with in your head.
Food is science, and science is math. Yes you can make a good soup with absolutely no further math knowledge than how to count to 10, but what is your food cost per portion? How much would you have to sell a bowl of it for to make any money? What if your tomatoes were half off from your supplier? How much would it cost then?
Restaurant businesses fail more often than any others, and I’m sure there are a lot of factors around why, but one problem that often comes up is managers and owners who don’t know where all the money is going. Knowing what amount of money is tied up in product and stock is vital to knowing how your business is doing. Food costing is easy, too. I dropped high school math at the first possible opportunity, and the basic classes that I took were not my strongest subjects, but knowing this simple math makes me a better chef.
The basic food costing formula: the cost of all ingredients in a dish divided by the number of servings it makes.
Example –
- Dry pasta costs $1/kg.
- Salt is $1/kg.
- Water is free.
If I cook 1kg of dry pasta in 50g salt and 6l water then:
$1+$0.05+0= $1.05. 1kg of cooked pasta (25 portions)=$1.05
$1.05/25 portions = $0.042 per portion of cooked pasta.
In the restaurant business, food cost should account for about 30% of the price on the menu (the rest goes to labour, and overhead.) Without a basic idea of food costing, a lot of easy to avoid problems can suddenly find themselves in between you and profit. There are other things to consider as well, like the yield of a given ingredient [how much is edible] also commonly called the edible portion. I’ll post a follow up, including examples shortly.
