Percy Plate is a web-based food cost calculator for food trucks, caterers, cottage food producers, and small restaurant owners. It lets you enter your ingredients and what you pay for them, build recipes, and instantly see the cost per serving and recommended sell price based on your target food cost percentage.

Yes. Percy Plate has a free plan that lets you create up to 10 ingredients and 5 recipes to calculate food cost. A paid subscription ($14.99/month or $119.99/year) unlocks unlimited ingredients and recipes plus inventory tracking, revenue reporting, menu engineering, Prime Cost, AI invoice scanning, FDA nutrition facts labels, FDA ingredient labels, and label printing.

How does Percy Plate calculate food cost?

You enter each ingredient, the unit you buy it in (lb, oz, gallon, etc.), and what you pay per unit. When you build a recipe, Percy Plate converts the recipe quantities to your purchase units, calculates the cost of each ingredient used, and divides by the number of servings to give you a cost per serving. It also shows the food cost percentage and a suggested sell price.

Can Percy Plate generate nutrition facts labels?

Yes. Percy Plate can look up nutrition data from the USDA FoodData Central database for each ingredient, then automatically calculate the per-serving nutrition for a recipe. It generates an FDA-format Nutrition Facts panel that can be printed directly to thermal labels (Brother, Dymo, Zebra) or Avery sheet labels in sizes 2x4 inch and 3.33x4 inch.

Can Percy Plate generate an ingredient list label?

Yes. Percy Plate generates an FDA-compliant ingredient label that lists ingredients by weight (heaviest first), automatically detects the top 9 FDA allergens, and includes your business name and net weight. Labels can be printed to thermal printers or Avery sheet labels.

What label printers work with Percy Plate?

Percy Plate supports thermal label printers including Brother QL series (DK-1202 2x4 inch labels), Dymo LabelWriter (30334 and similar), and Zebra desktop printers. It also supports Avery 5163 (2x4 inch) and Avery 5164 (3.33x4 inch) sheet labels for standard desktop printers.

Who is Percy Plate designed for?

Percy Plate is designed for small food business owners including food truck operators, cottage food producers, caterers, small restaurant owners, and anyone who sells homemade or prepared food and needs to track ingredient costs, price their menu, and produce product labels.

Does Percy Plate work on mobile?

Yes. Percy Plate is a web application that works on any device with a modern browser, including phones and tablets. You can look up ingredient costs, update recipe quantities, and check your food cost percentage from anywhere.

How do you calculate food cost percentage?

Food cost percentage = (ingredient cost per serving ÷ menu price) × 100. For example, if your ingredients cost $3.50 and you sell the dish for $12.00, your food cost percentage is 29.2%. Most food businesses target 28–35%. To set a price from a target, divide ingredient cost by your target: $3.50 ÷ 0.30 = $11.67 suggested price at 30% food cost.

What is a good food cost percentage for a small food business or bakery?

Most food businesses target a food cost percentage between 28% and 35%. Bakeries and cottage food producers often achieve lower food cost percentages (20–28%) because flour, sugar, and butter are inexpensive relative to retail prices. Full-service restaurants tend to run 30–35%. The right target depends on your labor costs, overhead, and pricing power in your market.

How do I calculate the cost per serving of a recipe?

Add up the ingredient cost for the full batch, then divide by the number of servings. For each ingredient, multiply the quantity used by the cost per unit (converting units as needed). For example: 8 oz flour at $0.89/lb = $0.89 ÷ 16 × 8 = $0.44. Sum all ingredient costs, then divide by servings. Percy Plate does this calculation automatically once you enter your ingredient prices and recipe quantities.

How does yield percentage affect recipe costing?

Yield percentage accounts for trim loss, cooking shrinkage, and waste. If you buy 1 lb of chicken but only 0.75 lb is usable after trimming, your yield is 75%. To get accurate food costs, divide the as-purchased cost by the yield percentage: $4.00/lb ÷ 0.75 = $5.33 per usable pound. Percy Plate lets you set a yield percentage (AP to EP) on any ingredient so your recipe costs reflect what you actually use.

What is the best recipe costing software for a small food business?

The best recipe costing software for a small food business depends on your needs. Percy Plate ($14.99/month) is built specifically for cottage food producers, food trucks, caterers, and small restaurants — it includes recipe costing, menu pricing, FDA ingredient labels, nutrition facts labels, inventory tracking, and revenue reporting. Competitors like meez start at $24/month and scale to $199/month. Square and Toast do not include recipe costing natively.

Is there free recipe costing software for home bakers or cottage food businesses?

Yes. Percy Plate has a free plan that includes recipe food cost calculation and menu pricing suggestions. The free plan lets you create up to 10 ingredients and 5 recipes. For unlimited recipes, FDA labels, nutrition facts, and inventory tracking, the paid plan is $14.99/month or $119.99/year. No credit card is required to start.

How do I price homemade baked goods to make a profit?

Start with your ingredient cost per batch, then divide by the number of units to get ingredient cost per item. Add packaging (boxes, bags, labels) as a per-unit cost. Then set a target food cost percentage — most cottage food bakers aim for 25–35% — and divide your total ingredient cost by that percentage to get a minimum price. For example: $0.85 ingredient cost per cookie ÷ 0.30 = $2.83 minimum price at 30% food cost. Factor in your time and overhead to ensure you are actually profitable, not just covering ingredients.

What are the labeling requirements for cottage food products?

Most states require cottage food labels to include: (1) the product name, (2) your name and home address, (3) a list of ingredients in descending order by weight, (4) a disclosure statement such as 'Made in a home kitchen not inspected by the state or local health department,' and (5) allergen declarations for any of the 9 major FDA allergens present. Some states also require net weight. Requirements vary by state — check your state's cottage food law for specifics. Nutrition Facts panels are generally not required for cottage food operations below a certain revenue threshold.

Do I need a nutrition facts label on my cottage food products?

Most cottage food producers are exempt from FDA Nutrition Facts label requirements under the small business exemption (fewer than 100 full-time employees and fewer than 100,000 units sold annually). However, you must still list ingredients in descending order by weight and declare all major allergens. Some states impose additional requirements. When in doubt, check your state's cottage food law and the FDA's small business labeling exemptions.

What allergens must I disclose on a homemade food label?

FDA requires disclosure of 9 major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. These must be declared on all food labels, including cottage food products — even if a full Nutrition Facts panel is not required. The standard format is a 'Contains:' statement after the ingredient list, for example: 'Contains: Wheat, Eggs, Milk.' Percy Plate detects all 9 allergens automatically from your ingredient names.

How do I create a nutrition facts label for homemade food?

To create a Nutrition Facts label for homemade food: (1) look up the nutrition data for each ingredient using the USDA FoodData Central database, (2) calculate the per-serving amounts for calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein, sodium, and other nutrients, (3) format the panel according to FDA guidelines with serving size, servings per container, and daily value percentages. Percy Plate automates this — it looks up USDA nutrition data for your ingredients, calculates per-serving totals, and generates a print-ready FDA-format Nutrition Facts label for thermal or sheet labels.

How do I list ingredients in the correct order on a food label?

FDA regulations require ingredients to be listed in descending order by weight — the ingredient present in the greatest amount by weight must appear first. For example, if your muffin contains more flour than sugar, flour must be listed first. Sub-ingredients (like those in a chocolate chip) must be listed in parentheses immediately after the component. Percy Plate sorts ingredients automatically by weight when generating your label.

What information is required on a homemade food product label?

A complete homemade food label generally requires: (1) the name of the food, (2) the net quantity (weight or count), (3) an ingredient list in descending order by weight, (4) allergen declarations for all 9 major FDA allergens, (5) your business name and address, and (6) for cottage food specifically, a state-required disclosure statement such as 'Made in a home kitchen not inspected by the state health department.' Nutrition Facts panels are usually optional for small cottage food producers below certain revenue thresholds.

By Heidi Macomber · August 31, 2026

Consignment Pricing for Cottage Bakers: What to Charge When the Shop Takes 20%

The math that gets you paid after the shop takes its cut, worked out line by line.

The question every baker group asks

In a cottage baking group this week, a baker shared her pancake mix bags. A local boutique wants to stock them alongside her baked goods, and the boutique takes 20% on consignment. She had a guess from an AI chatbot of $12 to $15 and felt that was high for her area. She asked the group where to price.

She is asking the right question at the right time. Price too low, and every bag she sells quietly underpays her for the evenings she spends mixing, filling, and labeling. Price without knowing her costs, and she is guessing in front of customers. The fix is plain arithmetic: figure out what one bag costs to make, then adjust for the shop's 20% cut with one final division.

This guide walks through that same scenario, one line of arithmetic at a time. Your numbers will differ. The method stays the same.

What consignment actually means

Consignment means the shop displays your product but does not buy it. You still own every bag on that shelf. When a bag sells, the shop keeps an agreed percentage and pays you the rest. The 20% this boutique charges is on the friendly end of normal. In the craft and handmade world, a typical consignment split is 60/40, with the shop keeping 40 percent (Craft Professional).

The percentage is only one part of the deal. We come back to the other terms worth getting in writing near the end.

Step 1: Cost the mix per bag

Everything starts with what one bag of mix costs to fill. Say a batch fills 12 bags. Here is a realistic dry pancake mix batch using retail-size purchases from any grocery store:

Ingredient	Amount used	Cost
Flour (3 lb of a 5-lb bag at $4.50)	3 lb	$2.70
Sugar (1 lb of a 4-lb bag at $3.20)	1 lb	$0.80
Baking powder	3 oz	$0.50
Salt	pinch	$0.05
Buttermilk powder	8 oz	$3.00
Batch total	fills 12 bags	$7.05

The division is the whole trick:

$7.05 ÷ 12 bags = $0.59 of mix per bag

Fifty-nine cents. If that number surprises you by being small, hold on. Dry mixes are cheap inside the bag. The money is everywhere else, which is exactly why guessing fails.

The free recipe cost calculator does this division for you. Enter the batch, enter 12 "servings," and your cost per serving is your cost per bag.

Step 2: Your packaging is an ingredient

The bag and the label are not overhead in some faraway sense. They are per-unit costs, bought one per bag, every bag, forever. Count them exactly like flour:

Kraft stand-up pouch: about $0.40 each in packs of 100
Printed label: about $0.25 each

$0.59 mix + $0.40 pouch + $0.25 label = $1.24 of materials per bag

Look back at the numbers: the pouch and label together cost $0.65, more than the $0.59 of mix inside them. The container outcosts the food. Bakers who leave packaging out of the math underprice every bag without ever knowing why the money never arrives.

Step 3: Pay yourself, or the math lies to you

A restaurant benchmark says food should run 28% to 35% of the price. That benchmark was built for restaurant dishes, where ingredients are the biggest cost on the plate and labor gets tracked separately. A dry mix is the reverse: the ingredients inside the bag cost 59 cents, and your hands-on time is the biggest cost of all.

Time the whole cycle once, start to finish: mixing and portioning the batch, then filling, sealing, and labeling each bag. For 12 bags, 90 minutes end to end is realistic. At a modest $15 an hour:

90 minutes = 1.5 hours. 1.5 × $15 = $22.50 per batch.

$22.50 ÷ 12 bags = $1.88 of your time per bag

Now the true cost per bag stands up:

$1.24 materials + $1.88 time = $3.12 per bag

This is the number everything else builds on. If you take one thing from this guide: cost the bag with your time in it before you think about the sticker.

Step 4: Price it as if you sold it yourself

Using the standard 35% target, the price that works at a farmers market or your own online shop is:

$3.12 ÷ 0.35 = $8.91

Sanity check: at $8.91, the $3.12 cost is 35% of the price. That leaves 65 cents on every dollar for everything else: the farmers market fee, the gas, the jar that breaks, and eventually profit.

Step 5: Divide by what you actually keep

Here is where the boutique's 20% enters, and it is simpler than it feels. The shop keeps 20 cents of every sticker dollar. You keep 80 cents. So a sticker price must be bigger than your direct-sale price by exactly the chunk the shop takes:

$8.91 ÷ 0.80 = $11.14

Round to a shelf-friendly $11 or $12.

Check it backward to believe it. At $11.14: the shop keeps 20% ($2.23), you receive $8.91. Your cost was $3.12, so $8.91 − $3.12 = $5.79 per bag in your pocket, and your cost is 35% of what you actually received. Every number lands where it should, and that round-trip check is how you know the price is right.

So was $12 to $15 crazy?

No, and now you can see why. At $12, you receive $9.60, and the $3.12 cost is 32% of it. At $15, you receive $12.00, and cost is 26%. The chatbot's range landed inside the standard band for this cost structure. It was guessing, and it still landed close, because $12 to $15 is where a $3 bag with a 20% shop cut usually ends up.

The problem was never the range. The problem was trusting a range before knowing the cost. Change one cost input and the shelf price moves with it, faster than most bakers expect.

Here is the pattern behind that speed. The two percentages stack: you are aiming for cost to run 35% of what you take home, and the shop keeps 20 cents of every sticker dollar before you see anything. Multiply 0.35 by 0.80 and you get 0.28. Each sticker dollar leaves you about 28 cents to cover costs, so every $1.00 of cost per bag needs about $3.57 of shelf price to pay for itself. Sixty more cents of buttermilk powder per bag means roughly $2.14 more on the shelf tag ($0.60 × 3.57).

If your area genuinely tops out below the formula price, the formula has told you something the group could not: either find a cheaper pouch, batch bigger, or treat this boutique as marketing and take the thinner margin on purpose. That is a decision you make with numbers in front of you.

Consignment terms worth getting in writing

The percentage is the headline; these are the terms that protect you:

Settlement schedule. When does the shop pay you? Monthly, in writing, with a list of what sold.
Unsold product. Who owns it, when do you pick it up, and what happens if it sits past its date?
Damage and theft. Product that walks off the shelf was still your product. Agree on who eats that loss.
Price control. The shop should not discount your mix without asking you, because every discount comes out of your 80%.
Exclusivity radius. If the boutique wants to be the only shop in town carrying you for a while, get it in writing, with an end date, and weigh it against other shops you may want to sell through later.

A two-paragraph signed note covering these five lines turns a friendly handshake into a deal you can plan around.

Consignment or wholesale?

The alternative is wholesale: the shop buys your bags outright, usually at 50% of retail, then resells at whatever price it likes. On our numbers:

Consignment at 20%: you net $5.79 per bag, but you wait for sales, and unsold bags are still yours.
Wholesale at 50%: the shop pays you $5.57 per bag against an $11.14 retail, your margin per bag is $2.45, and you get cash up front with zero shelf risk.

Consignment pays more per bag when things sell. Wholesale pays you up front and takes the shelf risk off your shoulders. A path many makers follow is to start on consignment to prove the product sells, then switch those shops over to wholesale orders. Art-business site Artsy Shark describes exactly this move: consign first, and once the merchandise sells well, switch the account to wholesale invoicing.

Work it for your own product

The five steps take about ten minutes with a calculator:

Batch ingredient cost ÷ bags per batch = mix cost per bag
Add packaging, bag and label, per unit
Add your time: batch hours × your hourly rate ÷ bags
Divide by 0.35 for your direct-sale price
Divide by 0.80 (or 1 minus the shop's cut) for the shelf price

Percy Plate's free recipe cost calculator handles step 1, the menu price calculator handles step 4, and the calculators page keeps all 14 formulas in one place. Walk one product through all five steps and you will never price by guesswork again.

Related Guides

Recipe Costing 101: How to Cost Out Any Recipe for Profit — the full batch-to-unit costing method behind Step 1
Delivery App Commissions: What DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub Actually Take — the same divide-by-what-you-keep math for restaurant delivery
How to Price Your First Menu Before You Open — setting a target food cost percentage from scratch
Cost Per Portion: The Formula Every Food Business Needs — why per-unit thinking beats per-batch thinking

Stop guessing what your dishes cost.

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