MenuCost for cloud kitchens
Every dish you send out has a real cost. Do you know it?
Know the true cost of every dish across every brand you run: ingredients, packaging, kitchen staff time and shared overhead, all included. Stop estimating and price with confidence.
- 7-day free trial
- Instant setup
- Unlimited recipes
Examples from MenuCost's demo kitchen.
A cloud kitchen's costs go far beyond ingredients
Buy ingredients, cook, price above cost. On paper it looks simple. In practice, most of the cost never makes it into the number.
Multi-component dishes are hard to cost
Each dish combines ingredients with different unit costs, quantities and waste. Costing by hand takes time, and one supplier price change makes it stale.
Packaging is absorbed on every order
Every dish leaves in a box, bag, tray or sleeve. Across hundreds of daily orders, untracked packaging is a real slice of your cost per serving.
Staff time varies by dish
A simple rice dish takes 5 minutes. A grilled protein with sides takes 15. Without tracking it per recipe, every dish gets the same labour assumption.
Shared overhead must be recovered
Rent, electricity, gas, equipment and indirect staff are fixed costs. If every portion doesn't carry its share, your margins are overstated by exactly that amount.
Example from the demo kitchen
One Grilled Chicken Salad. Two very different margins.
The salad sells for SAR 32 on delivery apps. Most operators count the ingredients and absorb the rest. Here is the same dish, costed two ways.
Ingredients only
Packaging, staff time and overhead left out.
The true cost, in MenuCost
Ingredients, packaging, staff time and overhead, all counted.
SAR 2.25 of real cost per order was invisible. At 100 orders a day, that is SAR 6,750 a month missing from the numbers you price from.
Staff time: 10 minutes at SAR 8 an hour. Overhead: SAR 0.86 per item.
Built for how a cloud kitchen really runs
One kitchen, one ingredient library, many brands. Every dish costed with all four layers, so the margin you see is the margin you earn.
One number per dish you can trust
MenuCost adds all four layers into one cost, then shows gross profit, margin, food cost % and a suggested price to hit your target food cost.
One shared library across all your brands
Chicken per kg, rice per kg, oil per litre. Every recipe pulls from the same library. When a supplier raises a price, update it once and every brand's recipes recalculate.
Ingredient ManagementEvery box, bag and spoon on the recipe that uses it
Takeaway boxes, paper bags, sauce cups and cutlery, each costed from purchase price and pack size, and shown as its own cost layer.
SAR 15.15 for 250 spoons = SAR 0.06 per order Packaging Cost TrackingKitchen staff time priced into every recipe
Set an hourly rate per role, from kitchen hand to senior chef, and the prep time per dish. A 20-minute dish carries twice the labour of a 10-minute one.
10 minutes at SAR 8 an hour = SAR 1.33 per dish Labour Cost ManagementShared kitchen costs spread across every portion
Enter rent (with a production share), utilities, equipment depreciation and other overheads once. MenuCost applies the result to every recipe, across every brand.
SAR 17,116.67 a month ÷ 20,000 portions = SAR 0.86 per item Overhead Cost AllocationSee which dishes, and which brands, earn their place
Every dish's margin side by side, with category summaries per brand. The Classic Beef Burger at 85.4% sits next to the Grilled Chicken Salad at 59.5%.
Menu Cost ReportsTest changes before they hit the business
Chicken up 15%? Prices up 10% on mains? A new hire adding SAR 3,000 to payroll? Move the ingredient, labour and price sliders and every dish's margin updates.
What-If Profit SimulatorAllergens across every brand's menu, built automatically
Tag each ingredient once with "contains" or "may contain" across all 14 allergens. Flour flows in as gluten, cheddar as milk, eggs as eggs, into every recipe that uses them.
Allergen ManagementRunning a cloud kitchen, with and without MenuCost
Without MenuCost
- Ingredient cost only, packaging, staff and overhead left out
- Prices copied from competitors or a rough margin
- Supplier increases absorbed without notice
- Packaging treated as one monthly expense
- No view of which dishes or brands earn most
- Overhead never tied to individual dishes
- Allergens tracked separately, by hand
With MenuCost
- All four cost layers in every recipe
- Prices set from true cost plus a target margin
- Update one ingredient, every brand recalculates
- Every box, bag and utensil on its recipe
- Full menu ranked by margin, brand by brand
- Overhead per item applied automatically
- 14 allergens tracked, profiles built automatically
What cloud kitchen operators say
"We were running three virtual brands from the same kitchen and had no idea which one was actually profitable. MenuCost showed us in the first week. One brand needed a full reprice."
"The overhead allocation changed how we think about pricing completely. I never realised our shared kitchen costs were adding to every item until MenuCost made it visible."
"Setup took less than a day. We imported our ingredient list, built the recipes, and had a fully costed menu before the next service. We've used it every week since."
We run several virtual brands from one kitchen. How does MenuCost handle that?
Organise recipes by category, one category per brand. The Profitability view shows every brand and item together, with summary cards showing average margin and food cost per brand. One ingredient library is shared across all brands, so a supplier price change updates every brand at once.
How does overhead work when brands share one kitchen?
Overhead is set once and applied per item across all recipes, whichever brand they belong to. Enter rent with a production share, utilities, equipment depreciation and other costs. MenuCost totals them, divides by your estimated monthly portions and applies the result to every recipe automatically.
Our menu changes often. How do we manage recipe updates?
Duplicate an existing recipe and adjust it, which is useful when you launch a variation of a dish you already cost. Archive a retired dish and it stays in your library, ready to bring back without rebuilding it.
We have a large ingredient list. Do we enter everything by hand?
No. With Bulk Ingredient Import, download the Excel template, fill in names, categories, prices, pack sizes and units, and upload it. The preview shows which rows are ready and which need fixing before the import runs.
How long does it take to cost a full menu?
Build your library with Bulk Ingredient Import, then add recipes at about 3 to 5 minutes each. Enter your overhead once and the per-item figure is calculated for you. A kitchen with 10 to 20 active recipes can usually be fully costed in one session.
MenuCost is built for every F&B operation
Know the true cost of every dish you send out
Price with confidence and protect your margins, across every brand.
- 7-day free trial
- Instant setup
- Unlimited recipes