How we calculate the cost of each recipe
Where the Cost Figures on Every Recipe Come From
Every recipe carries a cost. Here is exactly what is counted, what is not, and why the number is lower than you would get by adding up a shopping receipt.
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The short version
Each recipe's home cost is the price of the quantity actually used, not the price of the packets you buy. A recipe using two tablespoons of mayonnaise is costed at two tablespoons of mayonnaise, even though you will buy a jar.
That choice needs defending, because it is the one that makes the numbers look good. The reason for it is that the alternative is worse: costing a recipe at full pack price means the first batch of Big Mac sauce costs eleven pounds and every subsequent batch costs nothing, which describes no useful reality. Pricing the quantity used gives you the marginal cost of making the thing, which is the number that matters once you have a kitchen.
The trade-off is stated on every page that needs it: where a recipe requires buying something you will not otherwise use - a jar of Korintje cinnamon, a bottle of banana ketchup, a tin of chipotles in adobo - the page says so, names the item and tells you what else on this site uses it.
What is in the figure
- Ingredients, at the price of the amount used.
- Supermarket own-brand lines, not premium ranges, because that is what most people buy. Where a recipe genuinely needs a branded product to work - and there are a handful, mostly mayonnaise and mustard - the recipe says so and is costed at that product.
- UK prices in pounds sterling, converted to US dollars for the site-wide comparison figures at the exchange rate recorded on the price data.
What is not in the figure
- Energy. An oven at 200 °C for forty minutes costs real money and it varies enormously by country, tariff and appliance. Including a made-up average would be worse than excluding it and saying so.
- Your time. A three-hour dough is cheap in money and expensive in attention. The recipes that take a long time say so at the top, in the time panel, and you can price your own afternoon.
- Equipment. One-off purchases are covered in the kit guide rather than amortised into a recipe.
- Waste. The half a bunch of coriander that goes soft in the drawer. This is real and we do not model it.
What the "bought" figure is
The comparison price is the in-store counter price for the closest equivalent item, taken from the menu data this site holds, in the market the recipe was costed in. It is deliberately the in-store price rather than the delivery-app price, because using the app price would inflate the saving by about forty per cent on a comparison we did not have to inflate.
If you order through an app, the real gap is substantially larger than the one we print. The takeaway cost calculator lets you add the mark-up, delivery and service fees back in with your own numbers.
Where no equivalent item exists on a menu - a sauce sold only as part of a burger, a seasoning blend that is not a product - there is no comparison figure and the page shows the batch cost alone. We do not invent a counter price for something that is not sold separately.
How often the figures are updated
Ingredient prices are reviewed quarterly. Menu prices carry the date they were recorded on the menu page itself, because a price without a date is a rumour and chain prices move several times a year.
Who is responsible
The cost model is maintained under the [food.fast editors] (/team/food-fast-editors/) organisational byline. No individual professional credential is claimed for it. The useful parts are the published assumptions, the dated inputs and arithmetic that can be checked.