How much does it cost to make a sandwich?

A roast beef sandwich on ciabatta can cost you around $4.70 to make if you buy beef topside at $14.00 a kilo, get 1,300 g of sliceable meat from every 2 kg you roast, put 100 g in each sandwich with cheese, horseradish mayo, rocket and tomato, and pay $15 an hour for the work. That figure is an example with stated assumptions, not what a sandwich costs everywhere. Your meat, your yield and your grams will move it. Below is the method to work out your own, and it works the same for ham and cheese, chicken, turkey or a falafel wrap.

What goes into the cost of a sandwich

A sandwich is a stack of components, each with its own cost per gram or per piece. Following the general method for working out what any dish costs to make:

• Bread: per roll or per slice.
• Protein: roast beef, ham, chicken, turkey. Costed per gram cooked and sliced, never raw.
• Cheese: by slice weight.
• Spreads and sauces: butter, mayo, mustard, pesto, by grams.
• Salad: leaves, tomato, onion, pickles, after trimming.
• Cooking: the oven time for anything you roast yourself.
• Wrap: paper, bag, box, label, napkin.
• Labour: cooking, slicing, building and wrapping.

Step 1: meat by cooked weight

The protein is almost always the biggest line, and it is where most sandwich costings go wrong. You roast a 2 kg joint, but after resting and trimming you slice a good deal less than 2 kg. Cost it by raw weight and every sandwich looks cheaper than it is.

1. Note what you paid for the raw meat.
2. Weigh what you can actually slice once it has cooked, rested and been trimmed.
3. Divide the price by the sliceable grams: that is your cost per gram.

That yield is yours. It changes with the cut, the supplier and how far you cook it. The guide to meat yield goes into detail, and the yield tool gives the real cost per usable kilo after trim and cooking loss.

Step 2: weigh the portion

Someone building sandwiches by eye can put 80 g of beef in one and 120 g in the next. At over $20 a kilo of sliced beef, that 40 g gap is close to a dollar a sandwich.

Weigh the meat in ten sandwiches built the usual way and take the average. To keep everyone consistent, weigh out portions before service or use a slicer setting and a slice count. The guide to portion control shows how to do it without slowing the lunch rush.

For bought-in sliced ham or turkey, weigh ten slices, work out what one weighs and multiply by the slices per sandwich.

Step 3: the small things

Each small item looks like nothing on its own. Together they add up:

• Leaves and tomatoes lose cores, stalks and outer leaves. Cost them by what you use, not what you bought.
• Spreads are easy to overdo. Weigh a typical scrape of butter or mayo once.
• The wrap, bag, label and napkin are on every sandwich.

Worked example: roast beef on ciabatta

Every number here is an assumption. Use your own.

The beef. You roast 2 kg of topside at $14.00 a kilo: $28.00. After resting and trimming, you weigh 1,300 g of sliceable beef.

• Cost per gram: 28.00 ÷ 1,300 = $0.0215
• Per sandwich, 100 g: $2.15
• One joint makes 1,300 ÷ 100 = 13 sandwiches.

The tomato. $3.50 a kilo, and after cores you use 900 g of every kilo. Per sandwich, 40 g: 3.50 ÷ 900 × 40 = $0.16.

The beef is $2.15 of $4.67, close to half the cost. That is why yield and portion weight matter more than anything else on the list. If the same joint gives you 1,100 g instead of 1,300 g, the cost per gram becomes 28.00 ÷ 1,100 = $0.0255, the beef in each sandwich becomes $2.55, and the sandwich costs $0.40 more without anyone doing anything differently at the counter.

Other sandwiches

The method holds for anything you put between bread:

• Ham and cheese: cost the ham and cheese by slice weight, as above.
• Chicken: the yield is the weight of meat left after roasting or poaching and taking off skin and bone.
• Egg mayo or tuna mayo: treat the filling as a small recipe. Cost the batch, weigh it ready, divide by the scoops you get.
• Wraps: the tortilla replaces the bread; everything else is the same.

From cost to price

The cost per sandwich is your floor. The plate price tool works out a price from the cost and the food cost percentage you want. With the example, a 60% margin on the price before any sales tax gives 4.67 ÷ (1 − 0.60) = $11.68. Check your local tax rules for what goes on top.

If the price your area will pay does not reach that, look at the meat grams and the yield before touching the bread or the salad. That is where the money is.

Do it with the calculator

In the food cost calculator, enter what you paid for the raw meat and its sliceable weight, the grams per sandwich, the bread, the extras and the wrap. It returns the cost per sandwich and the price you need for your margin.