Recipe Costing & Menu Engineering

Introduction

Ingredient prices move, and a dish that made money in spring can lose it by autumn. Recipe costing software stores each recipe with its ingredients and yields, prices it from your supplier costs, and shows the margin per portion. Menu engineering goes a step further by comparing that margin with how often each dish sells, so you can see which items to promote, reprice or drop. Many products also hold allergen and nutrition data on the same recipe, and some update costs automatically from scanned supplier invoices, so plate costs stay current without retyping prices.

Who needs it

Chefs and owners who still cost dishes in a spreadsheet, bakeries and caterers who price by the batch, and groups that want the same recipe costed the same way at every site. It becomes worth having when supplier prices change often enough that your menu prices drift out of date.

Written 30 September 2026