How to build a recipe cost card: gross, net and yield loss

A recipe cost card is not a recipe — it is the dish's costing document. It records the exact weight of every ingredient, its price and its yield loss. Without cost cards a restaurant does not know its own cost of goods, and therefore cannot price anything correctly.

What it is for

• Knowing the exact cost and margin of each dish
• Justifying the selling price
• Holding a consistent portion size (the quality standard)
• Deducting ingredients from stock automatically on every sale
• Calculating theoretical stock during inventory counts

The last two matter most: without cost cards, loss cannot be measured at all, because there is no theoretical figure to compare the count against.

Gross and net

These two words carry the whole calculation.

• Gross weight — the weight before processing, meaning the weight you purchased
• Net weight — the weight after processing, the part that reaches the dish

The formula works in both directions:

Net = gross × (1 − loss %)
Gross = net ÷ (1 − loss %)

In practice you need the second one: the chef knows the plate should carry 120 grams of meat, while you need to know how much to buy. At 12% trim loss:

Gross = 120 ÷ (1 − 0.12) = 120 ÷ 0.88 = 136 grams

Those 136 grams belong in the cost, not the 120. In many restaurants exactly those 16 grams fall out of the calculation — and they repeat on every single portion.

Loss happens twice

Weight is usually lost in two stages:

1. Cold prep — trimming, peeling, boning. Weight drops.
2. Cooking — frying, boiling, roasting. Weight drops again (25-40% on meat).

If the card states the cooked plate weight, both losses have to be accounted for. The simplest way to avoid confusion: treat net as the raw trimmed weight, and record the cooked yield on a separate line.

How to measure yield loss

Do not take the number from a reference table — your supplier's product is different. Measure it yourself:

1. Weigh the product (gross) — 1,000 grams
2. Prep it the way you normally do
3. Weigh it again (net) — 830 grams
4. Loss % = (1,000 − 830) ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 17%

Repeat at least three times across different deliveries and take the average. Seasonal products shift through the year: vegetables can lose 25% in winter and 15% in summer.

Worked example: a lagman cost card (1 portion)

• Beef — net 120 g, 12% loss → gross 136 g × 90,000 UZS/kg = 12,240 UZS
• Flour — 110 g × 8,000 UZS/kg = 880
• Carrot — net 40 g, 20% loss → gross 50 g × 6,000 = 300
• Onion — net 30 g, 16% loss → gross 36 g × 5,000 = 180
• Bell pepper — net 25 g, 25% loss → gross 33 g × 22,000 = 726
• Tomato — net 40 g, 5% loss → gross 42 g × 14,000 = 588
• Oil — 25 g × 26,000 = 650
• Herbs — net 5 g, 30% loss → gross 7 g × 30,000 = 210
• Salt and spices — 300

Total cost: ~16,100 UZS. At a 55,000 UZS selling price the food cost is 16,100 ÷ 55,000 = 29.3%, leaving a margin of 38,900 UZS.

Prep items: cascading cards

Anything used across several dishes — a sauce, a stock, a dough, a marinade — gets its own cost card, costed per kilogram. It then appears in the dish card like any other ingredient.

The work is done once, and the payoff shows on every price change: when tomatoes go up, the sauce recost itself, and the six dishes that contain it are recalculated with it.

Common mistakes

• Recording only net weight. Cost comes out low and the food cost figure becomes fiction.
• Skipping the small items. Salt, spices, oil, napkins. Each is trivial; together they are 3-5%.
• Never updating prices. A card costed three months ago no longer works. Weighted-average purchase price is the most accurate basis.
• Not fixing the yield. If the portion weight is not written down, the cook plates a different amount every day.
• Forgetting modifiers. Extra meat, extra sauce — they consume ingredients too.

Where to start

1. Take the 20 best-selling dishes from your sales report.
2. Build a card for each with real weights — with the chef and a scale, not from memory.
3. Measure the loss percentages yourself instead of copying a reference table.
4. Move prep items into their own cards.
5. Refresh prices monthly and watch how food cost moves.

Twenty cards is about a week of work, and they cover 80% of revenue. The next step is connecting those cards to sales, so that selling a dish deducts ingredients from stock at gross weight. A POS system normally handles that part, which is what makes theoretical stock and real food cost visible at any moment.