How to calculate and reduce food cost % across a multi-venue group

Food cost percentage is the share of food sales spent on the ingredients that produced them. It's the single most-watched number in restaurant operations because small movements compound fast across a group.

The formula

Food cost % = (Cost of goods sold ÷ Food sales) × 100. To calculate it for a period: take opening inventory, add purchases, subtract closing inventory to get COGS, then divide by food sales for the same period.

Worked example: opening inventory €12,000 + purchases €30,000 − closing inventory €10,000 = €32,000 COGS. With €100,000 food sales, food cost % = (32,000 ÷ 100,000) × 100 = 32%.

Healthy benchmark ranges

• Full-service restaurants typically target 28–35% food cost.
• Bars and high-margin beverage-led venues run lower.
• Prime cost (food + labour) is usually managed to roughly 60–65% of sales.

These are starting points, not laws — the right number depends on concept, format and market. What matters more than the absolute figure is the trend and the variance between venues that should be comparable.

How to reduce it across venues

• Re-cost recipes regularly — supplier prices drift and so does your margin (see recipe drift).
• Watch theoretical vs actual usage to surface waste, over-portioning and shrinkage.
• Compare like venues against each other; the outlier usually has a fixable cause.
• Catch supplier price increases the day they land, not at month-end.

In a group, the highest-leverage move is comparison. When one venue runs 3 points hotter than its peers on the same menu, the cause is almost always specific and addressable — a portioning habit, a supplier line, a wastage point. The hard part is spotting it early, which is exactly what continuous monitoring is for.