Busy isn’t the same as making money on every plate.

The pot, not the plate

Most food businesses cook in batches, so start where the money is spent: the pot. Write down everything that went into one full batch of a dish, at what you actually paid for it this week:

• the main ingredients: rice, beans, flour, the fish or the meat;
• the oil, the tomatoes, the pepper and the onions;
• the seasoning and the salt, roughly.

Add it up. That’s what the pot cost to fill. Then count, honestly, how many plates it served. Not how many it should serve: how many actually went out.

Food cost per plate = what the pot cost ÷ plates it served.

Then what goes on each plate

Some things are added plate by plate, not in the pot: the egg, the extra piece of meat, the gari, the pack for takeaway, the spoon. Add those to the cost of each plate that gets them. A waakye with egg and wele costs more than plain waakye, and should be priced like it.

A worked example

Say a pot of waakye costs ₵450 to fill and serves 30 plates. That’s ₵15 a plate. You sell a plate at ₵40, so you keep ₵25 on each, which is about 63p of every cedi taken. The calculator above does exactly this sum; put your own figures in.

Now add a boiled egg at ₵2.50 and a piece of wele at ₵4 to a plate you sell for ₵48. That plate costs ₵15 + ₵2.50 + ₵4 = ₵21.50, and you keep ₵26.50. Worth knowing before you decide what “with egg” costs.

Food cost percentage

The same numbers, as a share: food cost ÷ price. In the example, ₵15 ÷ ₵40 is 37.5%: food takes a bit over a third of the price. Many restaurants aim for about a third or less, but your own number, watched over time, matters more than anybody’s rule. If it creeps up, something has changed: prices at the market, the portion size, or waste.

Setting a price

Work backwards. Decide what share of the price you want food to take, then:

Price = cost per plate ÷ that share.

At ₵15 a plate and a target of a third, the price is ₵45. Then look at what the chop bar down the road charges, and at what your customers will pay. If the sum says ₵45 and the street says ₵35, the answer isn’t to guess; it’s to change the portion, the ingredients or the dish.

What the plate cost doesn’t include

This is only what went into the food. Gas or charcoal, rent, water, light, wages and the MoMo charge all come out of what you keep. A plate that keeps ₵25 is not ₵25 profit. It’s ₵25 towards everything else.

When market prices move

Rice, oil, tomatoes and meat don’t hold still. When a big ingredient goes up, redo the sum for every dish that uses it. The first sign of a problem is usually a busy week that somehow left less money than a quiet one.

Keeping portions honest

A plate cost is only as good as the portion. If the pot is meant to serve 30 and serves 26, every plate cost you more than you think. Count plates against pots for a week. On Pro, Tabworthy can help: make the rice or the chicken a supply that each dish draws on, and stock shows how much should be left after every sale, so a pot that runs out early shows up.

Tabworthy doesn’t work out your profit for you. It tells you exactly what sold, so the sums on this page are done with real numbers, not guesses. The daily sales record is the paper way to get the same numbers.