Build a dish from its ingredients to get the plate cost, then drop in your menu price to see the food cost percentage and the gross margin you keep on every plate.
Pricing a plate by hand once is easy; keeping every plate honest as costs drift is the grind. Lowboy handles the drift for you, so you can stay on the line where you'd rather be.
Plate cost is every ingredient in a single dish added together — mains, sides, sauce, garnish, and the small stuff. Once you have it, two numbers fall out of the menu price:
A $3.60 plate sold at $12.00 runs a 30% food cost and leaves $8.40 of gross margin per plate. Aim for a food cost that keeps your blended average on target — the big number turns amber, then red, as a dish drifts high.
Don't leave out oil, salt, butter, or garnish — small components add up fast across a busy service and are the top reason a plate's real cost beats the menu math. To work backward from a target margin to a price, use the menu price calculator; to check your whole operation, see the ideal food cost calculator.
The plate cost you build here is a snapshot — accurate today, stale the next time ribeye jumps 18%. Lowboy is the sous-chef for the back of house: snap the invoices, menu, and recipes you already handle, and it computes every plate cost and food cost % from your actual prices and sales, then keeps them current and flags the dishes that drift over target. The same paper you already touch becomes live, actionable numbers that save you money and time — no data entry, no change to your workflow.
Lowboy is $149/mo or $1,490/yr (two months free), with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The audit below is free and shows your real plate costs first.
Snap a menu and a few invoices. No login, no card. About 3 minutes.
Do the math: a kitchen spending about $50,000 a month on food that trims that by just 1% saves roughly $500 a month — about 3.4× the $149 plan. One caught price hike or one re-priced dish usually clears it.
Add the hours back, too — no spreadsheet nights, no manual invoice entry, no rebuilding the prep list when the menu changes.
Less time on the back office, more time on the food, your crew, and the reason you opened.
Get your free audit →