What is a good food-cost percentage for a restaurant in Egypt?

It depends on the category — grills, bakeries, cafés and juice bars all run differently, so there is no single right number. What matters is knowing your own percentage per dish and per category, then pricing so it leaves room for rent, staff, utilities and delivery. Many table-service dishes aim for roughly a third, but treat that as a starting reference, not a rule.

How do I calculate the cost of one dish?

List every ingredient in the recipe with the exact quantity it uses, cost each quantity in pounds from what you actually pay your supplier, and add them up. That total is your plate cost. Divide it by the menu price to get the food-cost percentage.

Do I need restaurant inventory software to track food cost?

No — you can start with a notebook or spreadsheet and cost your top dishes by hand. Software helps once you have many dishes and supplier prices that keep changing: Orderlya's Scale plan recosts every recipe automatically when an ingredient price updates, so your food-cost numbers stay current without manual re-entry.

How to calculate real food cost per dish in Egypt (and stop guessing)

Most kitchens price by feel and hope the month works out. It usually doesn't. Here is how to work out what a dish actually costs you — in pounds — and price it so you keep the margin you think you have.

What food cost per dish really means

Food cost per dish is simply the total cost of every ingredient that goes into one plate — the protein, the sauce, the bread, the garnish, the oil it fries in — added up in Egyptian pounds. That number is the floor: sell below it and you lose money on every order, no matter how busy you are.

The trap is guessing. A koshari, a shawarma, a burger — each feels cheap to make, so it gets priced by what the shop next door charges. But onion prices move, oil moves, cheese and meat move a lot, and a menu price set six months ago can quietly turn a bestseller into a loss-maker. The only way to know is to cost the plate.

Step 1 — cost the recipe, ingredient by ingredient

Take one dish and write down every ingredient with the exact quantity it uses — not the bag you bought, the amount on the plate. If you buy rice at EGP 40 per kilo and a portion uses 150 grams, that portion costs EGP 6. Do the same for every component, including the cheap ones that add up: the oil, the bun, the sauce, the paper wrap.

Add them together and you have the raw plate cost. Do this honestly — the small items are where the money leaks. A few pounds of cheese, tahini and pickles per shawarma, multiplied across a thousand orders a month, is a real line on your P&L.

Step 2 — turn it into a food-cost percentage

Now compare the plate cost to the menu price. Food-cost percentage = plate cost ÷ menu price. If a dish costs you EGP 30 and you sell it for EGP 100, that is 30% — a healthy number for many restaurant categories. If the same dish costs EGP 45, you are at 45%, and after rent, staff, gas, electricity and delivery, the margin left is thin.

There is no single 'correct' percentage — a grill house, a bakery and a juice bar all run differently. The point is to know your number per dish and per category, so you can see which items carry the menu and which ones you are effectively selling at a discount without meaning to.

Step 3 — account for waste and portioning

The plate cost on paper is the best case. Real kitchens trim, spill, over-portion and throw away what doesn't sell in time. A cook who eyeballs the cheese instead of weighing it can add 10–20% to a dish cost without anyone noticing — that is your margin walking out with every plate.

Two fixes cost nothing: write down the target portion for each dish (grams of protein, ladles of sauce) so every cook plates the same, and track what gets wasted for a week. You will usually find one or two ingredients doing most of the damage, and those are the ones worth controlling first.

Step 4 — recost when your suppliers change prices

In Egypt, supplier prices don't sit still. Oil, chicken, cheese and imported items can jump between deliveries, and every jump quietly raises your food cost while your menu price stays the same. A dish that was 30% in the spring can be 38% by the autumn — and you would never know from the register.

The discipline that protects your margin is recosting: whenever a key ingredient's price changes, update the recipe cost and check which dishes crossed a line. Doing this by hand in a spreadsheet is possible but slow, which is exactly why most kitchens stop doing it after a month.

Let the software do the recosting for you

This is the part Orderlya can take off your plate. On the Scale plan, inventory with recipe costing links each dish to its ingredients, so when you update a supplier price once, every recipe that uses it recosts automatically — and you see, per dish, what your food-cost percentage is right now, not what it was last season. Its AI invoice scanning can read a supplier invoice into your stock, so keeping costs current is a scan, not an evening of typing.

You don't need software to start — a notebook and the four steps above will already tell you more than most restaurants know about their own kitchen. But once you have twenty or fifty dishes and prices that move every week, having the recosting happen for you is the difference between knowing your margin and guessing at it.

How to calculate real food cost per dish in Egypt