How to calculate bakery recipe cost per portion

Write down what you buy, what you paid and how much is in the pack. Then work out the price in the unit your recipe uses.

If a 5 kg bag of flour costs $6, flour costs $1.20 per kilogram. A recipe using 2 kg uses $2.40 of flour.

Keep units consistent. You can't multiply the price of a bag by a quantity in grams. The same goes for bottles, tubs and boxes.

Use one currency for the whole calculation. If you buy in dollars and sell in lira, convert with one rate, write down which rate and when, and don't mix the two in the same percentage.

Here is a sample batch of 20 cheese man'oushe. The prices are made-up teaching numbers, not supplier quotes or a recipe recommendation.

• Flour: 2 kg at $1.20 per kg = $2.40
• Cheese: 1.5 kg at $8.00 per kg = $12.00
• Oil: 0.1 litre at $4.00 per litre = $0.40
• Yeast, salt and the rest together = $0.60

The batch costs $15.40 in ingredients. If it makes 20 pieces you can sell, each piece costs $15.40 ÷ 20 = $0.77.

For your own recipe, list every small ingredient with its real quantity and price. If you don't know a price yet, leave it visibly blank rather than guessing.

A batch meant to make 20 might give you 18 that are good enough for the counter. The ingredients still cost $15.40, so each sellable piece now costs about $0.86.

That difference adds up when you bake the same recipe every day. Check portion sizes, what's left in the bowl and anything that doesn't pass your standard. Write the real yield next to the recipe so everyone uses the same number.

Keep unsold pieces separate. If 20 good pieces reach the counter and two are left at closing, record that as waste. Don't quietly lower the recipe yield to hide it; the fix might be a smaller batch, not a different recipe.

Say each piece is wrapped in $0.08 of paper. You now have $0.77 of ingredients and $0.08 of packaging: $0.85 per piece.

If you sell it for $2.50, your food cost is $0.77 ÷ $2.50 × 100 = 30.8%.

The $1.73 left after ingredients isn't profit yet. It still has to pay for packaging, staff, gas, electricity, rent and waste.

Whatever you include, include it the same way every time, so you can compare one item with another.

If the same dough goes into several products, cost the dough batch once and note how much it makes. Then give each product its share of dough plus its own topping.

Cheese and zaatar man'oushe can share one dough and keep their own topping costs. When the flour price moves, you update it in one place and every product that uses the dough follows.

Check real portions in the kitchen, not just on paper. A recipe costed at 100 g of topping misleads you if the usual serving is 130 g.

Update ingredient prices when a new delivery changes what you pay. Recheck the yield when you change batch size or method, and the finished item when the portion, topping or selling price changes.

Start small: your best seller, the item with the most expensive filling, and the one that's often left over. Getting those three right already tells you a lot.

Never treat a missing price as zero. The total looks reassuring precisely because something expensive is missing.

On plans that include inventory, Simplrr lets you record your ingredients, build your recipes and reuse a shared dough across products. It shows the cost behind each item, and it tells you when a price is missing or an amount looks wrong, instead of showing a margin that looks better than it is.

You can try the calculation yourself above.

See the bakery POS overview, or start free and ask us about recipe costing for the recipes you actually make.

Looking at the whole picture? See Simplrr's POS for Lebanon for restaurants, cafés and bakeries.