There are two food cost numbers worth calculating. One is for a period — how much of your food sales went on ingredients. The other is per dish — what a single plate costs to make against its menu price. You need both.
Cost of goods sold for a period
COGS = opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory. If you started the month with GH₵12,000 of stock, bought GH₵40,000, and counted GH₵10,000 at month end, your COGS is GH₵42,000. That is the value of the food you actually used.
Food cost percentage for the period
Food cost % = COGS ÷ food sales × 100. On GH₵140,000 of food sales, a COGS of GH₵42,000 is a 30% food cost. Track this figure period to period rather than against a benchmark from an article — a steakhouse and a pizzeria have very different numbers and both can be healthy.
Food cost per dish
Build the dish from its ingredients at the quantity the recipe uses, price each at what you last paid, and add them up. A burger using GH₵14 of ingredients on a GH₵45 menu price has a plate food cost of 31%. Do this for your top sellers first — they move the average most.
What a rising percentage means
If your period food cost climbs, one of four things happened: ingredient prices rose, portions grew, waste went up, or menu prices lagged behind cost increases. Per-dish costing tells you which dishes are responsible so you can re-price, re-portion or re-work them rather than raising every price.
Keeping it current
The hard part is not the formula, it is keeping the inputs fresh. If purchases and counts are recorded as they happen, both numbers are available whenever you want them. Restovax computes food cost per dish from your recipes and recorded purchase prices, and the period figure from your counts.
Run the period calculation every month and the per-dish calculation whenever a supplier price moves. The percentage on its own is just a number — it is the trend and the per-dish breakdown that tell you what to do.
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