By Heidi Macomber · September 7, 2026

You are about to open your own place. The contractor has questions, the health inspector has a checklist, the POS company wants a decision, and somewhere in there you are supposed to write a menu and price it.

Most new owners price by copying the restaurant down the street. That works right up until the first supplier invoice changes, and then it quietly doesn't.

In this post I want to show you the math that decides whether your menu can make money, and how to do all of it yourself, for free, in one afternoon.

Here's how to do it yourself, for free

→ Pick your five menu items you expect to sell the most. Not the ones you love. The ones that will carry the room.

→ Open your supplier quotes or invoices and write down what you actually pay per pound, case, or container for every ingredient in those five dishes.

→ Cost out one plate of each dish. Break every recipe down to what goes on one plate. The bun, the two ounces of sauce, the pickle. This is the step everybody skips and it is where all the money hides.

→ Divide each plate cost by the price you plan to charge. A dish that costs you $2.85 to make and sells for $14 has a food cost of 20%. Most independent operators aim to keep food cost between roughly 28% and 35%. Under that and you may be undercharging; over that and every sale eats your margin.

→ Fix the outliers, not the whole menu. Raise the price, shrink the portion, re-source the ingredient, or cut the dish. One dish at a time.

That costs you nothing but an afternoon, and you can start it today.

Why should you care?

Food cost percentage is the cleanest signal in your business, because it holds everything else constant.

Same kitchen, same crew, same busy Friday night, and one dish is quietly handing you 8% less of every dollar than the dish next to it. Whatever caused that gap is sitting on the plate, and it is the only thing that changed.

Do this once and you know which five dishes to push. Do it never and you find out in six months, from your accountant, that your best-seller was your worst deal.

The trap in the spreadsheet method

Here is the part nobody warns you about: doing this by hand means redoing it every time a price moves.

Spreadsheets hold the old price until someone re-keys it. Your flour distributor bumps the case price in March, nobody updates the sheet, and by the time you notice you have been selling that dish at a loss for weeks. Every restaurant that closes in year two has a version of this story.

If your time is worth more than $14.99 a month, this is exactly what we built Percy Plate for.

You enter ingredient prices once. Every recipe gets an exact cost per serving, and it stays exact because when a supplier price changes, every dish using that ingredient updates with it.

You set your target food cost percentage and see suggested sell prices instantly, so pricing a new special takes a minute, not an evening.

You see prime cost (food plus labor), not just food cost, because food cost alone can look great while payroll quietly eats the rest.

And the first time a vendor price creeps up, the dashboard flags which dishes just got more expensive to sell. That is the spreadsheet trap, gone.

Create your free account → Free forever, no credit card, takes 30 seconds. Pro is $14.99/month if you want menu engineering, inventory tracking, and nutrition labels on top.

If you are still in the "considering it" stage

Do the five-dish exercise on paper anyway. The dishes you cost out before you sign a lease are the ones that tell you whether the concept works. It is a lot cheaper to learn a menu cannot carry its rent in a notebook than in a buildout.

View this article in the app: https://percyplate.com/blog/opening-a-restaurant-do-this-math-before-day-one