Recipe Costing and Menu Engineering

Most small kitchens price a dish from memory or from the last supplier invoice. Prices move, trimming and cooking loss are ignored, sauces and marinades are left out, and nobody can say which dishes actually earn the money.

This app does the arithmetic. Enter what you buy as pack size, pack unit and pack price, with the usable yield after trimming or cooking loss. Build each dish, and each prep such as a sauce or marinade, from those ingredients and from other preps, and add packaging or garnish as an extra cost per portion. The app works out cost per portion, food cost percent, the price needed to reach the food cost you choose (rounded up to a step you set) and the margin per portion. Add the menu price and the units sold in a period and the Menu engineering tab sorts every dish into star, plough horse, puzzle or dog with a suggested action, and shows the menu's overall food cost. Recipe cards prints one A4 card per recipe with ingredients, method and the allergens you typed.

What is inside:

• Ingredients, Recipes, Menu engineering, Recipe cards, Settings and Start here tabs
• Units kg, g, l, ml, pc and doz with automatic conversion
• A VAT setting (UAE standard rate is 5 percent) and whether your menu prices include VAT
• CSV import of ingredients, JSON backup and restore, print or save as PDF
• A worked example (a small cafe with 21 ingredients and 10 recipes) on a button and as importable files

Who it is for: cafes, restaurants, bakeries, cloud kitchens and caterers that cost their own recipes.

What it is not: not a POS or accounting system, it does not read supplier invoices and it gives no tax advice. The example prices are invented teaching figures, not market prices. Menu engineering ranks dishes against your own menu only. Allergens print only as you type them: check them against labels and your own food safety plan.

How it differs from the Restaurant Food Cost and Menu Pricing Workbook in the catalogue: that is an Excel file. This is a browser app with yield loss, preps used inside dishes, unit conversion, menu engineering from your sales mix and print-ready recipe cards, and it needs no spreadsheet skills.

Tested: the app's costing was compared with a separate Python implementation on randomised recipe sets, 1,375 values (portion cost, prep rollups, food cost percent, suggested price, margin, menu classes), with no differences. 23 scripted browser checks cover loading the example, validation errors, CSV import, backup export and restore, printing to PDF and the 375 and 1280 pixel layouts, with no console errors. Browser tests ran in Chromium and WebKit; Firefox, a real phone, a real printer and a real scanner were not available, so they were not tested.