The price on your supplier invoice is never the real cost per portion. Trim, cooking loss and wastage all reduce usable yield — this calculator works out the true cost once that loss is accounted for.
Purchase details
Yield after trim & cooking
Results
Yield percentage varies enormously by ingredient and preparation method — a whole fish might yield 45–55% usable flesh after filleting, while a trimmed eye fillet can yield 90%+ with minimal waste. The mistake many kitchens make is costing recipes against the as-purchased price without adjusting for this loss, which understates true food cost and erodes margin invisibly. Weigh a sample batch through your actual trim and cooking process to get an accurate yield % for your specific supplier and technique, rather than relying on a generic industry figure. This feeds directly into the calculations in our food cost calculator and the benchmarks in our food cost percentage guide.
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Weigh the raw product as purchased, then weigh the usable product after trimming and cooking (or after cooking loss alone, if trim isn't relevant). Divide the usable weight by the as-purchased weight and multiply by 100. Do this for a real batch under normal kitchen conditions — not a best-case trial — for an accurate number.
Australian commercial kitchens and suppliers work in metric as standard — invoices, spec sheets and recipe documentation are almost always in kilograms and grams, so keeping this calculator metric matches how the numbers actually arrive in your kitchen.
No — this calculates the true cost of a single ingredient after yield loss. For a complete dish with multiple ingredients, use this figure as an input into our food cost calculator, which handles multi-ingredient recipes.