Whether you are just out of college, or a veteran in the food industry running a food service or restaurant is not an easy task to do. It takes time and proper management to works while there are many other aspects to think about like making proper budgeting for food.
Many restaurant owners take this notion of recipe costing lightly. But, know that if you do not budget precisely, your restaurant is likely to fail. You need to figure out ways to save money where you can, reduce waste and have more efficient workflows.
That’s where recipe costing software comes in the play. Recipe costing software is a must-have tool for restaurant managers, as it ensures you don’t overspend and monitor ingredients costs effectively.
1. Recipe Cost Calculator
Recipe Cost Calculator is a simple yet smart software that will take care of all your recipe costing needs. It has a simple user interface that helps you with calculating restaurant food costs, bakery food costs, catering costs, ingredient costs, recipe prices, and food costs. Furthermore, it lets you add labor and packaging costs in your recipes as well.
However, the aims of Recipe Cost Calculator is to save thousands of hours of time spent in recipe costing and improve the profitability of food businesses. A small monthly fee can get you started with this amazing food costing software that can completely transform your business. 
Features
- You can see stunning charts of your recipe costs and easily know which of your ingredients are the most expensive.
- By simply entering the selling price for your recipe and the margin, it will automatically estimate your gross margin and food cost percentage within seconds.
- This recipe costing software assign suppliers and order codes to all your ingredients for quick ordering with the help of the shopping list feature.
- With this recipe costing software, you can easily get accurate allergen statements for your recipes by tagging your ingredients with major allergens beforehand.
- Moreover, it lets you know the nutrition data in your recipes you can set the serving size, serving description. Also, Recipe Cost Calculator software will help you update the nutrition data of your recipe. You can even download the standard U.S/Canadian nutrition label format to print labels.
- You can quickly link your ingredients to USDA database items. This will pull in nutrition data and help you with weight to volume conversion as well.
- Apart from this, the software also helps you with creating shopping lists for your entire production day, unit conversions, calculating waste and off-site backups to keep your data secure.
Pricing
- Free Plan: The free version has a limited set of features. It allows costing for 3 recipes with 10 ingredients limit.
- Small Plan: It is priced at $12.5/month billed annually. It features unlimited recipes, unlimited ingredients, sub-recipes, margin calculator, allergen tagging, export to MS Excel and more.
- Medium Plan: This plan is priced at $20/month billed annually. In addition to the above-mentioned features, this plan also includes powerful recipe editor, image uploads, shopping lists, and Print/PDF option.
- Large Plan: It comes at $30/month billed annually. This premium plan includes all the above-mentioned features along with nutrition data.
2. ChefTec
ChefTec is a leading-edge software by Culinary Software Services and perfectly designed to meet the needs of chefs, owners, and other food business professionals.
Additionally, it includes recipe and menu costing, nutritional analysis, inventory control, production, purchasing & ordering, and waste tracking.
ChefTec Ultra is their most powerful software deliberately designed for larger and complex food business operations. It is an ideal product for universities, large hotels, catering halls and conference centers that manage unlimited profit centers.
This recipe calculating software gives you the ability to link with QuickBooks, vendors’ ordering systems and POS systems for easy inventory management and food costing. It comes all-included with 10 profit centers and you can add an unlimited number of profit centers as per your needs.
Features
- This recipe costing software creates menu prices with centralized management control.
- Users can easily analyze recipe and menu costs based on yield or portion. You can also store and scale unlimited recipes, add videos for preparation and training, add pictures of plate turnout and generate accurate catering bids.
- It easily manages the cost out your plates, events, and menus with low, high, current and average ingredient pricing.
- Maintain inventory control by highlighting usage, shrinkage, and waste. You can even track inventory across multiple locations.
- This recipe costing software generates orders automatically with user-defined shopping lists, par levels, and templates. Convert orders into invoices and interface with food purveyors ordering systems for better price and ingredient collaboration.
- It allows you to calculate nutritional data for recipes with the help of pre-loaded nutritional information of nearly 1300 ingredients. Users can even generate allergen alerts and nutrition descriptors automatically. Use pre-formatted Nutrition Facts labels to enhance your product packaging.
- Built-in Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point information, it helps you monitor your staff for safe food handling and portion control.
Pricing
- Ultra Package: Get this package at an effective cost of $2,295.
- Plus Package: Spend $1,995 and have all the elements of the plus package of the ChefTec.
- Basic Package: Starts this package at just $595/year for SaaS subscription version or $995/one-time-price for non-SaaS Desktop version.
3. Recipe Costing Software
Recipe Costing Software is a cloud-based solution that assists food businesses with inventory management, cost control, sales data tracking and much more. You can easily cost recipes, sub-recipes, and ingredients whilst including allergy and nutrition information for all ingredients. Moreover, users can view cost breakdowns for individual elements as well as the entire recipe. This software integrates with the USDA database, so users can search for standard nutritional data and print nutrition labels for their recipes. 
Features
- This recipe costing software easily calculates your recipes, sub-recipes, and ingredients including materials and labor to calculate accurate pricing.
- You can easily sync menu items with the POS partners and review your food costs. This will help you derive profitable menu pricing.
- Scale recipes as well as menu items up or down. This way you can estimate how little or more you want to make.
- It lets you organize inventory by item or group. Easily review your inventory depending on portioned values or purchase.
- Create nutrition labels with the help of the USDA database or manually. The software also lets you apply allergens to food ingredients, so they automatically populate when you create recipes.
- Also, you can create restaurant purchase orders in no time and email them to your sales team.
- It lets you use the shopping list wizard to create a shopping list based on available inventory.
Pricing
- Free Plan: This recipe calculating software provides you with a free 30-day trial version.
- Sous Chef Plan: It is priced at $25 monthly/Each Location. It includes unlimited recipes, unlimited menu items, food costing, unlimited users, food allergens and supplier management features.
- Executive Chef Plan: Spend just $50 for monthly/each location. In addition to the above features, this plan comes with features such as inventory receiving, purchase orders, and inventory management.
- Manager Plan: It costs you around $75 monthly/each location. It has additional features of data entry setup, expense tracking, nutrition labels, and inventory transfer.
- Restaurateur Plan: For $100 monthly/each location. This plan comes with A/P automation, monthly invoice scanning, and logs.
- Franchisor/Enterprise Plan: You can contact sales for a price quote. The franchisor plan allows for software customization, franchise management, and white labeling.
4. Ratatool
Ratatool is an online software developed and designed for restaurant owners and catering businesses to manage their daily recipe professional forms and evaluate their recipe costs. It is all in one tool easy to use and specially built to increase productivity and helps you gain profitability.
Our recipe costing tool simplifies your day to day recipe adjustments based on ingredients availability or your margin objectives. It manages for your recipe forms creation with preparation instructions.
Features
- Forget your excel sheets, you can manage your recipe forms (permanent online availability on all your devices securely)
- You can follow and edit your ingredients with their supplier details (purchasing and nutritional data)
- You can fix easily your prices and evaluate the food cost precisely and evaluate the gross margin indicators.
- With our recipe costing software, generate your purchase orders from the desired recipes quantities.
- You can print and share your technical documents (listings, recipes/ingredients, form recipe sheets, orders) with your cuisine teams.
- You can also associate automatically your nutrition tags (USDA basis) by ingredients and get the value per recipe.
Pricing
- Free Plan: A free version with some limited features to try the tool at your ease.
- Professional Plan: $29/month. It features unlimited recipes/ingredients, sub-recipes, professional forms, margin calculation, pie chart recipe overview, orders lists, PDF and documents export.
- Entreprise Plan: $49/month. In addition Profession plan features, you can add nutrition tags, follow price history and more.
