Menu Item Pricing Calculator

Setting a menu price from a target food-cost percentage is one calculation — but the SAME listed price behaves differently once a dish leaves the dining room. This calculator sets the price once, then shows what packaging and aggregator commission actually do to it across three channels.

The formula, in the open

• Selling price = ingredient cost ÷ target food-cost %. This is the ONE price used everywhere below — none of the channels get a different price.
• Dine-in gross profit = price − ingredient cost. Dine-in food-cost % = ingredient cost ÷ price × 100 — this should land on your target exactly.
• Takeaway adds your packaging cost to the cost side before the same two calculations, so its food-cost % is always worse than dine-in.
• Delivery adds packaging AND pays away a commission percentage of the price to the aggregator before profit is worked out — the cost side is the same as takeaway, but the revenue side is smaller.

A worked example

A dish costing ₹120 in ingredients, priced for a 30% target: ₹120 ÷ 30% = ₹400. Dine-in profit is ₹280, at exactly 30% food cost. Add a ₹20 packaging cost for takeaway: profit falls to ₹260, and food cost rises to 35%. For delivery, add the same ₹20 packaging, then a 20% commission on the ₹400 price (₹80): profit is ₹180, and food cost is 140 ÷ 320 ≈ 43.8% — the SAME plate, the SAME price, a food-cost swing of nearly 14 points just from how the order left the building.

What moves the number

The listed price is the one lever every channel shares, so raising it (see our menu price increase planner) helps all three at once. Packaging cost and commission are channel-specific and usually fixed by your supplier or your aggregator contract — the ingredient price increase calculator covers what happens when the ingredient side of this same sum moves instead.

Try it

Enter one dish below. The defaults are the worked example — replace them with yours.