How to Calculate Food Cost: A Step-by-Step Escandallo Guide

Knowing what every dish actually costs you is the difference between a restaurant that makes money and one that only feeds people. And that number has a name: the escandallo, or recipe costing. The problem is that most guides teach you to build the escandallo in Excel. By hand. And a hand-built escandallo is a snapshot that goes stale the same day your supplier raises the price of oil. In this guide I walk you through **how to do an escandallo step by step**, with the formula, a worked example and the mistakes that break the calculation. And at the end, how to automate it so it stops being a chore and becomes a number that updates itself. --- An escandallo is the **technical and financial card of a dish**: it breaks down every ingredient with its quantity, purchase price and waste, to get the real cost of a single portion. It is the foundation of everything else: - Without an escandallo you do not know the **ingredient cost** of what you sell. - Without cost you cannot work out the **food cost** or the **margin**. - Without margin you are pricing blind. In Spain, a healthy food cost usually sits **between 25% and 35%** of the selling price. If you have not done the escandallo, you cannot know whether you are inside that range or losing money on every plate. > 💡 **Key point:** the escandallo is not just for fine-dining dishes. Any menu item, however simple, drifts out of control the moment ingredient prices move. And they move every month. --- The method is always the same. Seven steps, in order. Write the recipe exactly as you cook it: every ingredient and the **amount you use** for the total number of portions. "A pinch of salt" is not enough — you need exact grams, millilitres and units. Note the **purchase price** of each ingredient in its buying unit: euros per kilo, per litre or per unit. Use the price before VAT from your latest invoice or delivery note, not the supermarket shelf price. Waste is the weight or volume you lose when cleaning, peeling, deboning or cooking. A 1 kg cut of meat does not yield 1 kg on the plate. The formula is: `Waste (%) = (gross weight − net weight) ÷ gross weight × 100` And the real cost of the cleaned ingredient rises accordingly: `Real cost = purchase price ÷ (1 − waste)` If 20% of some mushrooms is lost when cleaning them, their real cost is 25% higher than the purchase price. Ignoring waste is the most expensive mistake in recipe costing. Multiply the amount used by the real cost of the ingredient: `Line cost = amoun