Weekly Food Cost %: The Number Every Restaurant Owner Must Know by Monday Morning

What Food Cost % Actually Means#

Food cost percentage is the cost of ingredients as a proportion of food revenue. If you sell a dish for £14 and the ingredients cost £4.20, the food cost is 30%. Your target food cost % depends on your segment: fast casual typically targets 28–32%, full-service restaurants 30–35%, fine dining can run higher because of premium ingredients and higher menu prices. The number matters because it's the largest controllable cost in your business — labour can be scheduled around demand, but food cost is a daily management discipline that either is or isn't working.

The Four Drivers of Food Cost Overrun#

Supplier price increases not reflected in menu prices — your chicken breast has gone up 18% since you last revised the menu. Over-portioning — your portion guide says 180g of protein but the grill chef is eyeballing 210g. Waste — prep waste, spoilage, and mis-fires that go unreported and untracked. Theft — staff eating on shift without recording, or more serious diversion. A food cost overspend almost always has one or two dominant causes. Finding them requires weekly tracking against a theoretical food cost — the cost that should result if every recipe is followed exactly.

Theoretical vs Actual Food Cost#

Your POS knows what was sold. Your recipes define what each item should cost. Multiplying menu mix by recipe cost gives you theoretical food cost — what you should have spent on food this week if everything went to plan. Your actual food cost is what you actually spent (opening stock + purchases − closing stock). The gap between theoretical and actual is your variance: over-portioning, waste, theft, or unrecorded staff meals. If your theoretical food cost is 29% but your actual is 35%, 6% of revenue went somewhere unexplained. AskBiz calculates both numbers weekly using your POS sales data and supplier invoice data.

Setting a Weekly Food Cost Target That Drives Action#

Your annual food cost target sits in your P&L budget. Break it down to a weekly number — if you're targeting 31% annually, your weekly target is 31%. Measure every Monday: last week's food revenue from POS (e.g., £9,400), last week's food purchases plus stock movement (e.g., £3,290), food cost % = 35%. You're 4 points over. Call a chef meeting Tuesday morning: review portion control, check supplier invoices for price changes, conduct a waste log review for the week. Fix it before it compounds. Three weeks of 35% food cost on £9,400 weekly revenue is £1,128 in unexpected cost — a staff member's week of wages.

AskBiz + Xero: Automated Weekly Food Cost Reporting#

Connecting AskBiz to your POS sales data and Xero supplier invoices automates the weekly food cost calculation. By Monday morning, your AskBiz dashboard shows last week's food cost %, compared to your target and to the prior four weeks. If you're trending up, you see it visually. You can drill into which supplier invoices drove the highest spend and compare against your theoretical cost by menu category. The restaurant owner who previously spent two hours on Monday reconstructing this from spreadsheets now gets the answer in thirty seconds.

• A restaurant running a 36% food cost when the budget says 30% is losing 6p in profit on every £1 of food revenue.
• On £12,000/week in food sales, that's £720/week — £37,440/year — disappearing into waste, over-portioning, theft, or supplier price creep.
• AskBiz tracks food cost weekly against your target, so you catch the drift in week one, not at the quarterly P&L review.