💰 Recipe Cost Per Serving Calculator

The sum is easy; the ingredient prices are not

The tool adds up every cost row and divides by the servings:

total          = sum of all ingredient costs
cost per serving = total / servings

The three rows it opens with - chicken 6.50, rice 1.20, vegetables 2.80 - come to 10.50 across 4 servings, so $2.63 each. The work is in getting those figures right, because what belongs in the box is the cost of the amount you used, not the price on the packet:

cost used = pack price × (amount used / pack amount)

A 500 g bag of rice at $3.00 with 200 g in the pan is 3.00 × 200/500 = $1.20, which is exactly the rice row above. Chicken at $10 a kilo, 650 g of it, is $6.50.

Using it without fooling yourself

• Empty and non-numeric cost boxes count as zero, and a blank servings field falls back to 1. Ingredient names are labels only - nothing in the arithmetic reads them.
• Servings is the softest number here. Doubling the servings halves the cost per head on paper and changes nothing in the pan. Decide the portion first, then count it.
• Add a row for waste on anything you trim. If you bought a whole chicken and used the breasts, the breasts carry that cost, not the bird's average price per kilo.

Frequently asked questions