Why Food Should Be Costed Per Portion, Not Per Packet

The arithmetic problem with pack pricing

Cost a Big Mac sauce at pack prices and you get something like this: a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of relish, a bottle of French dressing, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika. Call it £11.

That is the cost of the first batch and it is the cost of no subsequent batch. The second batch costs £1.14, because you already own five of the six things.

Pack pricing therefore tells you almost nothing useful. It describes a situation - an empty kitchen, a single meal, never cooking again - that does not match anybody's life.

Marginal cost - the price of the quantity actually used - is what we publish, because it is the number that applies from the second batch onward, and for a recipe you make more than once that is every batch that matters.

The trade-off is honesty about the first batch, which is why any recipe here that needs something unusual names it, says what it costs, and says what else on the site uses it.

The six purchases that unlock most of this site

If you were starting from an empty cupboard and wanted the largest number of recipes here unlocked for the smallest outlay, this is the list.

Under £15 in total, and every one of them lasts months to years. That is the honest answer to "is it cheaper to cook at home" for somebody starting from nothing: there is an initial outlay, it is small, and it is a one-off.

What is not on that list is anything expensive. No stand mixer, no sous vide, no specialist flour. The kit guide covers equipment, and it is a similarly short list.

When the pack price genuinely is the cost

Three cases where marginal costing is the wrong frame and we say so on the page.

An ingredient with one use. Banana ketchup for Jolly Spaghetti costs about £2 and there is one recipe on this site that uses it. If you will make that dish once, the honest cost of the dish includes the bottle.

A perishable you will not finish. Buttermilk, soured cream, fresh herbs. A recipe using 60 ml of buttermilk from a 300 ml pot has a real cost closer to the pot than to the 60 ml, unless you have a plan for the rest. Our recipes try to suggest one.

Anything bought specially and used once. A whole bottle of peanut oil for a single batch of chips is £4 of the cost of that batch unless you strain and reuse it - which the recipe tells you to do, and which is why it is costed at a third of the bottle rather than all of it or none of it.

The rule we apply: cost the quantity used, and flag the purchase. The figure is the marginal one; the prose says what you will have to buy.

What is not in any of our numbers

Stated plainly, because a cost figure with hidden exclusions is worse than no figure.

Energy. An oven at 200 °C for forty minutes costs real money - roughly 25 to 50 pence in the UK at 2026 rates, depending on the oven and the tariff, and substantially different in the US or Australia. Including a made-up average would be worse than excluding it. Air fryers use notably less, which is a real point in their favour and one we make on the air fryer converter.

Your time. A three-hour dough is cheap in money and expensive in attention. Every recipe here carries its time at the top, and you can price your own afternoon better than we can.

Waste. The half bunch of coriander that goes soft. Real, and we do not model it.

Equipment. One-off purchases belong in the kit guide, not amortised into a burger.

Add all of those back and home cooking still wins comfortably on the numbers in this hub. But the honest figure is a little higher than the ingredient figure, and a site that pretended otherwise would deserve less trust.