How to calculate the food cost of a pizza, size by size

Step 1: write the recipe in weights

A pizza is a short recipe: dough, sauce, cheese and toppings. Weigh each one for every size you sell, the way your cooks actually make it. Ladles, handfuls and “a good layer” are not measurements; grams are. If your team portions by cups or by counting slices, weigh a few portions once and write down what one weighs.

Step 2: price each ingredient per gram

Take the price from your latest invoice and divide by what you received. The example below uses these prices, which are examples only; use your own invoices.

• Dough (made in house): CA$2.20 per kg
• Pizza sauce: CA$4.00 per kg
• Mozzarella, shredded: CA$12.00 per kg
• Pepperoni, sliced: CA$16.00 per kg

Suppliers rarely sell by the kilogram: cheese comes in bags and cases, sauce in cans. Turning those into a price per gram is its own small job, covered in how to cost a recipe from case prices.

Step 3: add it up for every size

Multiply each weight by its price and add the lines. Then divide by the menu price before tax. Here is one pepperoni pizza in four sizes:

Want to try your own numbers? Open the food cost calculator and choose Fill in the pizza example to start from the 12-inch size.

Why the biggest pizza earns the smallest share

A pizza’s area grows with the square of its diameter: a 16-inch pizza has about two and a half times the surface of a 10-inch one, so it takes roughly two and a half times the cheese and toppings. Menu prices rarely follow; they usually step up by a similar amount per size. In the example the food cost climbs from 21.2% on the small to 29.6% on the extra-large.

That is not automatically a problem: the extra-large still earns the most dollars per pizza. But if most of your orders are large, your real food cost is closer to the top of the table than the bottom. Cost every size, and set each size’s price from its own cost.

Cost per slice

Divide the pizza’s food cost by the number of slices. The 12-inch pizza above costs CA$4.10; cut into 8 slices, that is about CA$0.51 a slice. Price slices from this, and remember that a slice counter also throws away the slices it does not sell.

What pushes pizza food cost up

• Cheese price and portion. Cheese is usually the largest line on the pizza.
• Over-topping. A heavy hand on meat adds up faster than on vegetables.
• Dough waste. Balls that over-proof or are made for a busy night that never comes.
• Specials and half-and-half pizzas priced as if they cost the same as a plain one.
• Delivery commissions, which do not change food cost but take their share of the same price.

Doing this for a whole menu

One pizza fits a spreadsheet. A whole menu, in four sizes, with prices that change on every delivery, does not. Mezbano keeps each size as its own recipe, prices every ingredient from your latest deliveries, converts cases, bags and cans into the grams the recipe uses, and shows each size’s recipe food cost next to its menu price on the Menu costs page. If an ingredient has no price yet, the pizza is marked incomplete instead of looking cheaper than it is.