Recipe Costing and Food Cost Percentage Tracking

Food cost percentage is the simplest number in a restaurant and one of the easiest to get wrong. The formula is plain: what the ingredients in a dish cost, divided by the price you sell it for. The trouble is the top half of that fraction. If the price of beef, sulguni or sunflower oil has moved since anyone last checked, the percentage on your spreadsheet describes a kitchen that no longer exists.

In Wox, every menu item can carry a recipe: the inventory items it uses, how much of each, and how much is lost in prep. From that recipe Wox works out a plate cost and a margin against the menu price. This guide covers building recipes, keeping their costs current, and acting on the numbers before a supplier price rise eats a month of margin.

What a recipe holds

A recipe in Wox is a list of lines. Each line links the dish to one item from your inventory catalog, with a quantity, a unit and an optional waste percentage. A khachapuri adjaruli might use 180 g of dough, 150 g of cheese, one egg and 20 g of butter.

The units on the recipe do not have to match the units you buy in. You can buy cheese by the kilogram and write the recipe in grams; Wox converts before it calculates cost. What matters is that the quantity reflects one real portion, weighed, not estimated.

The waste percentage covers trim and prep loss. If you buy whole trout and lose a third of it to the head, bones and skin, a fillet line with 30 percent waste carries the cost of what you actually had to buy, not only what landed on the plate. Plate cost is the sum of every line's cost, each grossed up by its waste.

Some components are made in-house and used across the menu: tkemali sauce, a stock, a pizza dough. These can have their own prep recipe, so the dish uses the prep as a single line and the prep carries its own ingredients.

Build your first recipes

Start with the dishes that sell most or cost most. Ten well-built recipes covering your best sellers will tell you more than eighty rough ones.

1. 1Open the menu, choose the dish and open its recipe.
2. 2Add each ingredient by picking the matching item from your inventory catalog rather than typing a free name.
3. 3Enter the quantity used in one portion and the unit you measure it in, for example grams or millilitres.
4. 4Add a waste percentage to any line that loses weight in prep, such as trimming meat, peeling vegetables or filleting fish.
5. 5For house-made components like sauces and doughs, build a prep recipe first and use it as one line in the dish.
6. 6Save the recipe and read the plate cost and margin shown for the dish.

On plans that include AI, Wox can also draft a recipe from the dish name, matched against your own catalog. Treat the draft as a starting point. Weigh a real portion, correct the quantities, and only then rely on the cost.

Make sure every ingredient has a price

A plate cost is only as good as the prices behind it. Each inventory item keeps a price history, and the most recent entry is its current price. New prices reach that history from waybills you review after they are imported from rs.ge, from supplier invoices you upload, and from prices you enter on the item yourself.

If an ingredient has no purchase price at all, the recipe editor says so. The plate cost shown is then a floor, not the full cost, and the margin looks better than it really is. Close those gaps before you trust any percentage.

1. 1Open the recipe and look for a notice that some ingredients have no purchase price.
2. 2Open each of those items in inventory and check whether a reviewed waybill or invoice has given it a price.
3. 3If it has no price, enter the current price you pay, in the unit you buy it in.
4. 4Return to the recipe and confirm the notice has gone and the plate cost has changed.

Keep plate costs current

Wox stores each recipe line's cost at the moment the recipe is saved. That is deliberate: a margin you saw in March can still be explained in June. It also means a recipe saved months ago can show a cost that is out of date.

To stop that from going unnoticed, the recipe editor compares the saved cost with what the same recipe would cost at today's prices. When ingredient prices have changed since the recipe was saved, it tells you and shows the plate cost at today's prices. One action, Update costs, re-costs the recipe. Managers and owners can run it.

A margin is only true for the prices it was calculated with.

1. 1Once a month, open the recipes of your top-selling dishes.
2. 2Read the notice that appears when ingredient prices have changed since the recipe was saved.
3. 3Compare the saved plate cost with the plate cost at today's prices.
4. 4Choose Update costs to re-cost the recipe at current prices.
5. 5Write down which dishes moved most and which ingredient caused the change.

Read food cost percentage dish by dish

With costs current, the menu shows a plate cost and a margin for every dish that has a recipe. Food cost percentage is the other side of the same number. A dish selling for 24 ₾ with a plate cost of 7.20 ₾ runs at 30 percent food cost and a 70 percent margin.

There is no single right target. A wine bar and a khinkali house run very different numbers, and a high-cost dish can still earn its place if it sells well. What matters is knowing which dishes sit above the target you set, and why. Our guide to average restaurant food cost percentage covers the usual ranges.

wox.ge

Wox

Analytics

March 2026 · Downtown

Week

Month

Quarter

Food Cost

28.4%

↓ 1.6% vs target

COGS

$18.4k

↓ $1.2k MoM

Waste

$312

Stockouts

3

Weekly SpendLast 7 weeks

W1

W2

W3

W4

W5

W6

W7

Top Spend Category

Proteins

38% of total spend

Price Variance

+2.1%

vs last month average

1. 1Decide on a food cost target for the menu, or one per category if drinks, mains and desserts run differently.
2. 2Scan the menu for dishes whose margin falls below the matching target.
3. 3Open each of those recipes and find the line with the highest cost.
4. 4Decide whether the fix is the price, the portion, the ingredient or the supplier.
5. 5If the price is the answer, reprice the dish to a target margin from the menu, for one dish or several at once.

Compare recipe cost with what you actually spent

Recipe cost tells you what a dish should cost. The food cost variance report, available from the Growth plan, compares that theoretical cost, recipe cost multiplied by portions sold, with the actual food cost from purchases and stock use. The gap is the part recipes do not explain: waste, heavy portioning, stock that left the kitchen without a sale. Our article on actual versus theoretical food cost explains how to read it.

Record known loss in the waste log so it is not mistaken for a recipe problem, and watch ingredient price movements in price variance so you know which recipes to re-cost first.

Common mistakes

• Recipes built from free-typed names instead of catalog items. The line cannot find a price, so the plate cost is understated.
• Ignoring prep loss. A trimmed tenderloin costs more per plated gram than per bought gram.
• Reviewing costs only when the menu changes. Prices drift between menu changes, and a monthly look catches it early.
• Trusting an AI draft without weighing a real portion.

If you use Wox Analyst, you can ask it in Georgian or English which dishes have the weakest margins this month. It can propose repricing a dish to a target margin, and nothing changes until you confirm.