How much do your favorite meals cost?

Do the math and find out what your favorite meals and recipes cost. When you know how to calculate food cost for a recipe, you’ll have a better idea of how it compares with alternatives. You can decide between cooking it yourself or spending more money.

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It may be next level nerd stuff, but if you’re struggling to make cooking at home a habit, if the siren song of fast food is just too mesmerizing, maybe some math will help!

After all, money talks.

You may not hear it as loudly as some other voices, but when you figure out how to calculate food cost for a recipe, you have a valuable tool to deciding which recipes to make, how to maximize your grocery spending, and even how to avoid eating out.

Why do this

When you calculate the food cost for a recipe, you have a real point of comparison.

• You know which meals you should you make to maximize your grocery spending. For instance, what are the most satisfying of the cheap meals? Plan those meals more often and you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck!
• You know how much you can you save by avoiding fast food. When faced with a $50 ticket at Chipotle, you can weigh it against some of your favorites at home. You will almost always win with a homemade burrito bowl.

Calculating recipe costs can help you resist the tempation of fast food and get more for your money. Ready to save more money? Let’s do this.

How to calculate food cost of a recipe:

1. Pull out your grocery store receipts or look up your recent purchases in your grocery store app. Guesstimate if you’re not sure. We’re looking for ballpark pricing. You can easily find this online for most grocery stores. It’s important to use the price you’re paying, not the one someone 3 states over is paying.
2. Look at the ingredients of a certain recipe and create a chart, such as the one above.
3. Complete the chart for each ingredient used in the recipe. You’ll need to find the cost per unit called for in the recipe. For instance, if you use flour by the cup, then you’ll need to know the cost per cup.
4. Google if you aren’t sure how many cups are in a pound of flour or how many teaspoons are in an ounce of a certain spice or other product. Remember that the teaspoons/cups measure volume, but many ingredients are sold by weight. Yes, there’s math to this.
5. Add up the cost to prepare the recipe. Make note of this total cost as well as which ingredients might make or break the recipe. If you see the regular prices of some of your key ingredients increase, then you may not put them on the menu as often.

Let’s do an example. Because, yeah, math.

How much does it cost to make a pizza?

My husband and I make homemade pizza every Friday like clockwork. It’s just a part of our family culture. 

Since it’s cheaper to make pizza than buy it, it’s easily become a habit for us these past THREE decades. Please note: we like good quality pizza, no Dominoes or Little Caesars here. The average pizza is about 20 bucks here.

Let’s calculate the current cost to make a 12-inch pepperoni pizza in North San Diego County. We will need:

• flour
• water
• salt
• olive oil
• sugar
• pizza sauce
• mozzarella cheese
• pepperoni

I’m excluding salt and water from our calculations because they cost so little. Based on my shopping sales and clearance and shopping the best store for these ingredients (in this case, my ingredients were purchased from Costco Business, Ralphs, and Walmart), the cost to make one homemade pepperoni pizza comes to $3.41.

$3.41!

My 20-something sons all say that my pizza is better than what they could get elsewhere, and you know it’s cheaper! That’s even cheaper than a frozen pizza. 

Now, did I count the cost of going to the store or for electricity? No, I did not, but the profit margin is so large, it doesn’t really matter to me. 

How does knowing the recipe cost help you?

Knowing that I can make a pizza for less than $4, a pizza that feeds 2 people generously, makes it easy to decide what to make for dinner. Four slices is incredibly filling, so I know that this $2 cost per portion is a much better deal than many things.

While my husband has suggested on occasion that we forego our weekly pizza tradition, the savings we are seeing is huge! It’s worth making extra pizza to freeze for crazy nights.

Tips for Saving More Money

To truly maximize your grocery budget and dial in the best recipes for you to make on a budget, find your list of ten go-to meals, meals you love, and price them out. 

• Identify the yield and cost per serving of your favorite recipes so that you can prioritize them in your meal planning.
• Zoom in on the priciest ingredients. Can you find better sourcing for these? Buying flour at Costco Business since it’s gotten so expensive has made a huge difference.
• Keep a list of target prices in your phone or in your head. For instance, I don’t like to spend more than $3.50/pound on cheese. I know paying more will throw off my budget and increase the average price of my favorite recipes.
• Watch what’s going to waste. These prices are based on the entire package being used. If you let some cheese or pepperoni go to waste, then you increased the cost of the pizzas you made. Learn how to stop wasting food.
• Be intentional about splurges. Make the cheaper recipes a bigger percentage of your meal plan. You can still splurge, but knowing the food cost for a recipe will help you make that decision an informed one.

Getting food on the table while staying on budget isn’t as easy as it once was, but there are tried and true strategies to making it happen. Enjoy what’s on your plate without going broke.

Learn to Save More Money on Food