For the business behind the plate.

A ledger you can inspect

The product starts with ingredients, recipes and the relationships between them. Enter a purchase pack, its price and the amount you can use. Add measured quantities to a recipe, record the finished batch yield and choose a portion size. The calculation stays visible so you can trace a result back to its inputs.

A menu price is a decision, not an automatic answer. Costed Plate shows the ingredient cost, contribution and price implied by your chosen food-cost target. You still need to account for payroll, occupancy, equipment, tax and the way your guests buy. The tool does not claim that a percentage can run a restaurant for you.

Reference data with boundaries

Ingredient pages bring together USDA household portion weights, preparation-specific USDA yields and BLS retail price observations where a defensible match exists. A retail average is not a supplier quote. A historical preparation yield is not a promise about the next delivery. Each page names the source, preparation and observation date so those differences remain visible.

The worked dishes use original, explicitly defined ingredient lists. Their quantities are examples you can edit. We do not present the result as the universal cost of a dish, and we do not fill missing data with an invented market number. The research library distinguishes published survey medians from planning assumptions.

Your working copy stays with you

The costing ledger saves in this browser's IndexedDB storage. There is no account or cloud synchronization. Export a backup when you make important changes, and keep it somewhere you control. Clearing site data or losing the device can remove the local ledger.

The optional invoice reader is different: after your confirmation, it sends the selected invoice image to an AI provider through our server. You review extracted line items before anything changes in the ledger. The optional recipe reader follows the same boundary for a recipe photo or pasted text. Simple measured text lines are parsed locally. The privacy page explains these boundaries and the provider's retention policy.

Keep the numbers useful

Use the ingredient sources as a starting point, then replace prices with your invoices and yields with your own measurements. If a source is outdated, a calculation is unclear or a screen creates confusion, contact the team with the page address and the smallest example that shows the problem. Do not include an entire confidential invoice unless it is necessary and you intend to share it.