Cost Per Serving Calculator
Enter your total batch cost, how much it yields, and your portion size — see exactly how many servings you actually get and what each one truly costs, updating live as you type. Runs on the same shared formula engine as every other calculator here.
Batch & Yield
Tell us the whole batch's cost and how much it makes in total.
Menu Price (optional)
Have a price in mind already? Enter it to see food cost % and profit per serving. Leave it at 0 to skip this — the cost-per-serving result above works without it.
Want the full picture? Try the Ultimate Calculator — combines this with packaging, labor, fees, and overhead in one session.
How this is calculated ▸
floor(batch yield ÷ portion size) — rounded down, since a partial portion
isn't a sellable serving. Cost per serving = (total batch cost ÷ servings) + add-on cost.
When a menu price is set, food cost % = cost per serving ÷ menu price × 100.
Formula engine version .
Embed this calculator
Add it to your own site or blog — free, with attribution.
How to use the result
This calculator answers a narrower, more specific question than the Recipe Cost Calculator does. If you already know what a whole batch costs — a stockpot of soup, a full sheet pan, a big batch of sauce — and you want to know what one bowl, plate, or portion actually costs, this is the tool. Cost per serving is your floor for that single portion. Servings this batch makes tells you something a lot of kitchens get wrong by eyeballing: the real number of sellable portions a batch produces, not a rounded guess.
If you already have a menu price for this item, fill it in to see food cost % and profit per serving — that's a reality check on a price you've already set, not a suggestion for what to charge. If you're building a price from scratch instead, use the Target Menu Price Calculator (coming soon) once you know your cost per serving from here.
How this calculator works
Total batch cost is the full dollar cost of everything in the batch, combined — if you haven't built that number up ingredient by ingredient yet, the Recipe Cost Calculator will total it for you, and you can bring that number here. Batch yield and portion size use whatever unit makes sense for the dish — ounces, quarts, pounds — as long as both fields use the same unit. Servings are calculated as batch yield divided by portion size, rounded down to a whole number. That rounding-down is deliberate: a leftover half-portion isn't something you can sell as a full serving, so treating it as 0.5 of a sellable unit would understate your real cost per serving. Add-on cost is kept separate from the batch cost on purpose — a garnish or side that gets added at the point of service is a genuinely different kind of cost than something cooked into the batch itself, and separating them is what lets the calculator show you which one is driving your total.
Worked example
The example loaded above is a real batch of Chicken Tortilla Soup:
- Total batch cost: $38.40
- Batch yield: 640 oz
- Portion size: 8 oz per bowl
- Add-on (tortilla strips, cheese, lime): $0.17 per bowl
- Menu price: $3.75 per bowl
640 oz divided by 8 oz portions gives exactly 80 servings — no rounding needed here, though in a real kitchen you'll often get a fraction that gets floored. $38.40 spread across 80 servings is $0.48 per serving from the batch alone. Add the $0.17 garnish and the true cost per serving is $0.65. At a $3.75 menu price, that's a food cost of 17.3% and $3.10 profit per bowl before labor — a healthy number, though soups are naturally low-food-cost items compared to protein-heavy dishes, so don't read this specific percentage as a target for every item on a menu.
Common mistakes
- Estimating servings instead of calculating them. "About 80 bowls" from a stockpot is a guess; batch yield ÷ portion size is a number — and the difference between a guess and a real count shows up directly in your cost per serving.
- Rounding servings up. If a batch technically yields 82.5 portions, you can sell 82, not 82.5 or 83 — rounding up overstates how many servings you actually have to sell and understates true cost per serving.
- Folding the add-on into the batch cost. A per-serving garnish and a batch-wide ingredient behave differently as your batch size changes — keeping them separate is what makes the "smaller/larger portion" scenarios below actually meaningful instead of misleading.
- Mismatched units. Entering batch yield in quarts and portion size in ounces will produce a nonsense number — keep both fields in the same unit.
- Treating a healthy food cost % as the whole picture. Food cost % here doesn't include labor, packaging, or overhead — a low percentage on a soup doesn't automatically mean the item is your most profitable one once labor time is factored in.