Yield and Waste Calculator

The price on a supplier's invoice is never the price of what lands on the plate. Trimming — peeling, boning, offcuts — loses weight before anything reaches a pan, and cooking loses more to shrinkage and moisture, so the RAW cost per unit understates the true cost of the USABLE unit by however much both losses compound.

The formula, in the open

• Usable yield = (100% − trim loss %) × (100% − cooking loss %). The two losses multiply, they don't add: each one applies to whatever is LEFT after the previous step, not to the original raw unit.
• True cost per usable unit = raw cost per unit ÷ usable yield.

A worked example

A vegetable costs ₹200/kg raw. Trimming loses 20%, and cooking loses a further 10% of what's left. Usable yield = 80% × 90% = 72.0%. True cost per usable kg = 200 ÷ 0.72 ≈ 277.8, which rounds to ₹278 — almost 40% above the raw price, entirely from two ordinary-sounding percentages.

What moves the number

Cutting either percentage — better knife work on the trim side, gentler cooking (lower heat, shorter time, sous-vide) on the cooking side — raises the usable yield and lowers the true cost, because the two numbers compound. Take the trim loss from 20% to 15% with the cooking loss unchanged: yield becomes 85% × 90% = 76.5%, and the true cost per usable kg is 200 ÷ 0.765 ≈ 261.4, which rounds to ₹261 — a ₹17/kg drop from the same ₹200 raw price, purely from your own improved trim. The same compounding logic scales up once that ingredient goes into a batch — see the prep recipe cost calculator for costing the whole pot rather than one ingredient.

Try it

Enter your own raw cost and losses below. The defaults are the worked example — replace them with yours.