Food cost percentage
Updated August 2026
Food cost percentage is the raw ingredient cost of a dish divided by the price charged for it, expressed as a percentage. Caterers commonly aim for somewhere in the high twenties to mid thirties, and treat the figure as a sanity check on a price rather than as a way of setting one.
Also called: food cost ratio, plate cost percentage.
Why it matters to a small caterer
The percentage is useful because it is comparable. It tells you at a glance whether a dish is priced roughly where the trade prices that kind of food, and it catches the two obvious errors: a plate so cheaply priced that you are subsidizing the client, and one so expensively priced for what is visibly on it that the client will balk.
It is a bad pricing method for one reason: food is not your only cost. Labor and overhead are real and they vary enormously between a delivered tray and a plated dinner. Price from your loaded cost, ingredients plus labor plus overhead, against the margin you need, and then check the food cost percentage afterward to see whether the answer looks sane for that kind of dish.
Percentages are a compass, dollars are the destination
A premium menu legitimately runs a higher food cost percentage and can still out-earn a cheaper one, because the margin dollars per plate are bigger. A caterer optimizing the ratio rather than the money will steer toward high-markup, low-value food and wonder why the month is busy and thin.
Track it per dish rather than per event. An event average hides the one item that is quietly losing money on every job it appears on, and that item is usually the one clients love.
Where this shows up
Put the terms to work on a real quote
CaterKit costs every dish from your own ingredients, prices the quote at your margin, and sends it as a page the client can accept on their phone.