The recipe card is a dish’s reference document: its recipe, quantities and cost. It’s the building block of margin management in any restaurant. Without it, you can’t know your real food cost.
What is a recipe card for?
- Knowing the exact ingredient cost of a dish
- Setting the selling price at the right markup
- Standardising production (same result whoever cooks)
- Tracking allergens and nutritional info
- Reacting fast when a purchase price rises
What it should contain
- Yield: how many portions (or what weight) the recipe produces
- Ingredients: quantity, unit, and crucially the waste % (peeling, trimming, cooking loss)
- Sub-recipes: a house sauce, a dough… reused across several dishes
- Selling price (to compute the ratio)
- Preparation steps and, ideally, a photo
The key step: waste
A common mistake is to ignore waste. 1 kg of vegetables bought doesn’t yield 1 kg usable. If you cost on gross weight, your food cost is underestimated. The recipe card must include a waste rate per ingredient.
Sub-recipes: the manual-calculation trap
As soon as a house sauce goes into several dishes, manual calculation becomes a nightmare: changing one ingredient’s price means recalculating every affected card. This is where a tool becomes essential — it propagates costs automatically.
Build your cards without spending hours
FoodCostOS lets you create recipe cards with nested sub-recipes, waste and allergens — the ingredient cost, ratio and markup compute themselves and update when your purchase prices change. You can even import your ingredients from a CSV file to get started in a few hours.