Guides
Recipes, yield and waste
How to turn a recipe into a cost per unit you can trust: prepped ingredient costs, real yield, waste, portions and scaling, with a worked example.
- Recipe costing: yield, waste and scalingHow to turn a recipe into a cost per unit you can trust: prepped ingredient costs, real yield, waste, portions and scaling, with a worked example.→
- What recipe yield is and how to measure itWhat recipe yield means, why it rarely matches what the recipe says, and how to measure it over three batches so your cost per unit is right.→
- Yield percentage: as purchased vs edible portionHow to work out yield percentage from as-purchased to edible portion weight, and use it to cost what you peel, trim and cook. Formulas and an example.→
- How to measure and cost food wasteHow to log food waste for a few weeks, turn it into a cost per unit sold and add it to your product cost. With a worked example from a small bakery.→
- How to scale a recipe without breaking the costHow to scale a recipe up or down: the right conversion factor, rounding to what you can buy, what does not scale evenly and how to recost the bigger batch.→
- How to write a standard recipe cardThe fields a standard recipe card needs, why every quantity goes in grams, and how to get a true cost per unit from it. With a complete example card.→
- Portion control: what over-portioning costs youHow to work out what you lose when portions run bigger than your recipe, how to measure it in your own kitchen, and the simple tools that fix it for good.→
- Adjusting recipes to the pack sizes you buyWhen to cost an opened pack by the gram and when to cost the whole pack, plus four ways to fit recipes to what you buy so leftovers stop eating your margin.→
- Ingredient substitutions: when they save moneyHow to tell whether swapping an ingredient for a cheaper one really lowers your cost: compare per unit sold, with yield, prep time and quality all counted in.→
- How batch size changes your cost per unitWhy a bigger batch lowers your cost per unit, why each increase saves less than the one before, and how to find the batch size that actually pays for you.→
What does it really cost you?
Put your recipe into the free calculator: ingredients, packaging, your time and the gas. You get the cost per unit and your margin in two minutes, no account needed.