How to cost a dish without a spreadsheet

Costing a dish is not hard. It is the repeating that makes it break.

The method itself is four steps. The problem is that most kitchens do it by hand, in a spreadsheet, from prices that are already out of date.

Start from the recipe

A dish cost starts with the recipe, not with last month's numbers. List every ingredient, with the amount the recipe actually uses.

Price each ingredient

Give every ingredient the price you actually pay today. Not the price you wish you paid, and not the price from the last invoice you happened to open.

Sum and compare

Add the ingredients together to get the food cost of one portion. Compare it against the menu price, and the margin is the difference.

That is the whole of it: recipe, prices, sum, margin. The tooling exists to do it without the spreadsheet.