Dish Cost: The 30% Rule and Where It Breaks

01Cost is not a recipe, it is a tech card

A chef's recipe says "a pot of rice, one carrot". That is useless for costing. What you need is a tech card in grams: every ingredient, its net weight and the purchase price on that day.

The most-forgotten part is trim loss. Peel carrots and 20% disappears. Bone out meat and 25–30% goes. So if the card says 200 grams of trimmed meat, you bought 280 grams of raw, and the cost has to be calculated on that.

The second forgotten part is the small stuff: oil, salt, spices, packaging, napkins, the delivery box. Individually trivial, together 4–8% of the dish cost. Adding them as a single coefficient is enough.

02Worked example: one portion of plov

A kazan takes 5 kg of rice, 4 kg of meat and 4 kg of carrot, and yields 40 portions. Costing from the kazan rather than the portion is the correct way: plov, shurpa and lagman are all batch-cooked.

The kazan costs: rice 5 × 18 000 = 90 000, meat 4 × 95 000 = 380 000, carrot 4 × 6 000 = 24 000, oil and spices about 35 000. That is 529 000 UZS. Divided by 40, a portion costs 13 225 UZS.

If plov sells at 45 000 UZS, food cost is 29% — the rule holds. But if the kazan yields 34 portions instead of 40 (the bottom burns or staff eat it), the cost becomes 15 559 and food cost jumps to 35%. Real yield matters more than the recipe.

03Where the 30% rule breaks

Drinks run at a 10–15% food cost. Tea, lemonade, coffee: tiny cost, huge margin. That is why drink sales carry the whole evening in a dine-in restaurant, and why a "what goes with it?" modifier on every dish card pays off in a QR menu.

Conversely, a steak or fish at 40–45% food cost is perfectly normal. They are on the menu for money, not for percentage: one steak earns 40 000 UZS of margin, one tea earns 8 000. You need both, but you cannot manage them by the same rule.

For delivery the maths changes completely. Aggregator commission is 20–30% and packaging costs 3 000–6 000 UZS. A dish that is profitable in the hall at 29% food cost can lose money through an aggregator. Which is why the delivery menu and the hall menu do not have to match.

• Drinks: 10–15% food cost — offer them as a modifier on every order
• Meat mains: 35–45% is normal, and the margin in money is large
• Delivery: add commission and packaging to the cost and price it separately
• Staff meals and waste: count them separately, don't hide them in the dish cost

04Where the cost lives and who sees it

In many restaurants the cost sits in the accountant's Excel and is refreshed once a month. The menu price then reflects an old purchase price. Meat went from 95 000 to 115 000 and you only find out at month end.

In laCafe the cost is an internal field on the dish card: visible in the admin panel, never shown on guest screens. That field feeds the menu engineering report — the profit-versus-popularity matrix is built from it.

If you run iiko or r_keeper, costing and stock stay there — laCafe does not replace them. In that case you run menu engineering on the POS side while laCafe takes the sales channels and the guest side.