What is restaurant food cost? Food cost for your restaurant is the cost of ingredients that you have used to prepare the menu items that your restaurants sells. Quick Links to learn more about Cactus Food Cost Software! How to calculate food cost? Food cost is typically expressed in percentage of revenue that your restaurant makes. So, if your restaurant’s revenue for last month was $1M and you used $ 250K of meat, chicken, seafood, eggs, vegetables, oil, herbs, spices etc. t