In Professional Catering, What Is a Healthy Food Cost Percentage?
In professional catering, a healthy food cost percentage is typically 25–35% of the price you charge, with most UK event and contract caterers targeting around 28–32%. Fine dining and plated banqueting often run higher; canapé, buffet and drinks-led work often runs lower. These are typical industry ranges rather than rules — and in catering the percentage on its own tells you far less than it does in a restaurant, because staff, travel and equipment hire consume the same margin without ever appearing in the food cost line.
The short answer
In professional catering, a healthy food cost percentage is typically 25–35% of the price you charge. Most UK event and contract caterers aim for somewhere in the region of 28–32%. Fine dining and plated banqueting often run higher, around 33–40%, because ingredient quality is the product. Canapé, buffet and drinks-led work often runs lower, around 20–28%, because labour and presentation carry the price rather than the ingredients.
Those are typical industry ranges, not rules. No regulator or trade body sets a catering food cost percentage, and any figure quoted as a universal standard should be treated with suspicion. The number that matters for your business is whichever percentage still leaves a healthy contribution once staff, travel, equipment hire and packaging have been paid for — and that varies enormously between a drop-off buffet operation and a fully staffed wedding service.
If you want the general formula and how food cost percentage works across food businesses as a whole, our food cost percentage explainer covers that ground. This article is specifically about catering, where the maths behaves differently.
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Why catering food cost behaves differently from a restaurant
A restaurant sells individual dishes at menu prices it controls, and can adjust portion sizes, specials and menu mix week by week. A caterer sells a per-head price agreed weeks or months in advance, covering a fixed menu for a fixed headcount, delivered at a specific place and time. That single difference creates three structural problems.
1. The price is locked before the ingredients are bought
When you quote a wedding in November for the following August, you are committing to a price against ingredient costs you cannot yet see. Any inflation between quote and delivery comes straight out of your margin. A restaurant discovering that butter has gone up 18% can reprice next week. A caterer with a signed contract cannot.
2. Over-catering is deliberate, not accidental
Running out of food at an event is a reputational failure in a way that a restaurant running out of one special is not. So caterers deliberately produce more than the headcount requires — commonly somewhere between 5% and 15% extra, depending on service style and how firm the final numbers are. That surplus is a genuine, planned cost. If your costing does not include it, your real food cost percentage is always higher than the number in your spreadsheet.
3. A large share of total cost is not food at all
On a staffed event, the non-food direct costs can equal or exceed the food bill. These are not food cost, and should not be included in a food cost percentage — but they consume exactly the same margin.
The costs that are not food cost but eat the same margin
- On-site and prep staff hours. Usually the largest single non-food cost on a staffed event. Include travel time, set-up, service, and the clear-down nobody remembers to quote for.
- Travel and vehicle costs. Fuel, mileage, van hire, congestion and clean air zone charges, parking, and occasionally overnight accommodation for distant events.
- Equipment hire. Crockery, glassware, cutlery, linen, chafing dishes, urns, gazebos. Hire is often re-charged, but collection, breakage and shortfall charges usually are not.
- Disposables and packaging. Boxes, trays, film, labels, napkins and cutlery. On boxed or delivered catering this can be a surprisingly large line, sometimes more than a pound per head.
- Unpaid planning time. Site visits, tastings, menu revisions, dietary requirement handling and the quotes that never convert. Real cost, rarely priced.
- Cancellations, no-shows and late number drops. If your terms let a client drop 20 covers a week out after you have bought, that loss lands on you.
Worked example: costing a 100-head event
Here is a full costing for a 100-head summer wedding buffet quoted at £42 per head ex VAT — total revenue £4,200. The figures are illustrative and chosen to show the shape of the maths, not a benchmark for your own pricing.
Two things stand out. First, the food cost percentage is 31.7% — comfortably inside the healthy range, and on its own it looks like a well-priced event. Second, the non-food direct costs total £1,341, almost exactly matching the food bill. After everything, £1,526 is left to cover kitchen rent, insurance, software, marketing, quoting time and your own income. Whether that is a good event depends entirely on how many hours of your life it consumed.
This is why experienced caterers quote from a full event build-up rather than a menu price multiplied by a target percentage. For the tooling side of the same problem, our guide to catering management software compares the options.
See how caterers cost and plan events in FoodCore →
Food cost percentage is not gross margin
These two numbers get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not the same thing. Food cost percentage is food cost divided by selling price. Gross margin is what is left after food cost, expressed as a percentage of selling price. They always add up to 100%.
The practical value of the relationship is the multiplier: divide 1 by your target food cost percentage and you get the number you multiply ingredient cost by to reach a compliant price.
Notice how much the per-head price moves for the same menu. The difference between a 28% and a 35% target on the same £13.30 of ingredients is £9.50 per head — £950 on a 100-head event. That is the entire profit on many jobs. It is also why quoting to match a competitor's headline per-head price, without knowing their service model, is dangerous.
A word on VAT: do all of this arithmetic ex VAT. Compare net ingredient costs against net selling prices. Mixing a VAT-inclusive selling price with net ingredient costs will flatter your food cost percentage by roughly a fifth on standard-rated sales.
The classic catering mistake: quoting from last year's costs
Ask a caterer why a busy year produced a disappointing profit and the answer is frequently the same. The quote template still contains the ingredient prices from when it was built. The menu has not changed, the per-head price has not changed, and nobody re-costed it because the recipe looked identical.
Ingredient inflation does not announce itself. It arrives one delivery note at a time — a few pence on a line here, a supplier substitution there. A menu costing £13.30 per head that quietly drifts to £15.10 has moved from a 31.7% food cost to a 36.0% food cost at the same £42 selling price, and eliminated roughly £180 of contribution on a 100-head event without a single visible change.
How to stop it happening
- Re-cost before you quote, not after. Every quote should be generated from current ingredient prices, not from a saved price list.
- Keep supplier price history. You cannot see drift if you only ever hold the latest price.
- Build inflation into forward bookings. For events more than six months out, either add a contingency or include a price adjustment clause in your terms.
- Review contribution per event monthly. Not revenue. Contribution.
How FoodCore helps caterers hold their margin
FoodCore's cost calculator is available from the Growth plan at £40/month inc. VAT (or £400/year inc. VAT). It is built for exactly this problem: costing a menu from live ingredient prices rather than from a stale template.
Saved overhead presets. Rather than re-typing your assumptions on every quote, you save your standard delivery, packaging and overhead figures once and reuse them per event. The same assumptions are then applied consistently across every job, and when your packaging supplier puts prices up you change the preset rather than hunting through old quotes.
Profit per recipe. This shows the margin on every product and menu item you sell, so you can see which parts of your offering actually carry the business. Each row is badged with where its cost and price came from — so retail and trade figures are never silently mixed together in the same average. If you sell the same buffet package at a corporate rate and a private rate, you see them as two distinct lines rather than one misleading blended number.
Supplier price history. Also included from Growth, this is what makes drift visible. You can see what an ingredient cost three months ago against what it costs now, which is the difference between noticing inflation and being surprised by it at year end.
Growth also includes stock control, production runs and a production calendar, delivery-note photo intake, version history and undo, an orders and collections diary, payments and deposits, and wholesale price lists — all of which sit naturally alongside event work. Essentials at £25/month inc. VAT (£250/year inc. VAT) covers recipes, ingredients, allergens, labels, shelf life and automatic date labels, customer records and shopping lists, but not costing. Core at £65/month inc. VAT (£650/year inc. VAT) adds food safety with the HACCP and EHO pack, menus and allergen matrix, Business Insights, staff rota, meal planning, and teams and multi-site. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, no card required.
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Food cost percentage in catering: frequently asked questions
In professional catering, what is considered a healthy food cost percentage?
In professional catering, a healthy food cost percentage is typically 25–35% of the price you charge, and most event and contract caterers aim for somewhere around 28–32%. Fine dining and plated banqueting often sit higher at 33–40% because ingredient quality is the product being sold. Canapé, buffet and drinks-led work often sits lower at 20–28% because labour and presentation, rather than ingredients, carry most of the price. These are typical industry ranges rather than rules — the right number for your business is whichever percentage still leaves a healthy contribution after staff, travel, hire and packaging are paid for.
Is 30% food cost good for a catering business?
A 30% food cost is a reasonable, widely used target for UK event catering. It means every £1 of food you buy needs to be sold for roughly £3.33 ex VAT, and it leaves a 70% gross margin to cover staff, travel, equipment hire, packaging and overheads. Whether 30% is genuinely good for you depends on your labour intensity. A caterer doing high-touch plated service with six staff on site can be losing money at 30% food cost, while a drop-off buffet operation with two staff can be very profitable at 34%. Judge the job on contribution after all direct costs, not on food cost percentage alone.
How is catering food cost different from restaurant food cost?
A restaurant sells individual dishes at menu prices and can adjust portioning, specials and menu mix week by week. A caterer sells a per-head price agreed weeks or months in advance, covering a fixed menu for a fixed headcount, and then has to deliver it at a specific place and time. That creates three differences: the price is locked before the ingredients are bought, so cost inflation lands entirely on the caterer; over-catering is deliberate and structural because running out is unacceptable; and a large share of total cost sits in staff, travel and equipment hire, which are not food cost but consume the same margin.
What is not included in food cost for a caterer?
Food cost covers ingredients only — the raw materials that go into the dishes, plus a realistic allowance for trim waste and deliberate over-catering. It does not include staff wages, travel and vehicle costs, crockery, glassware, linen or chafing dish hire, disposables and packaging, insurance, kitchen rent, marketing, or your own time quoting and planning. Those are real costs of delivering the event, and on a staffed event they can easily exceed the food bill. Keeping them out of food cost is correct, but you must still price for them, which is why food cost percentage on its own never tells you whether an event was profitable.
How do I work out a per-head price from my food cost?
Start from the food cost per head, then divide by your target food cost percentage to get the food-driven part of the price. If your menu costs £13.30 per head in ingredients and you target 30% food cost, that gives £44.33. Then check that the resulting total revenue covers the event's direct non-food costs — staff hours, travel, hire and packaging — with a contribution left over. On small events the second step usually forces the price up, because fixed costs like travel and minimum staffing do not shrink with headcount. Always cost the whole event, not just the menu.
What food cost percentage should a wedding caterer aim for?
Wedding caterers commonly target a food cost of around 25–32%, at the tighter end of the catering range, because weddings are staff-heavy, involve long on-site days, and frequently include hire, service and coordination time that must be covered by the same per-head price. A wedding quoted at a 35% food cost with six staff on a twelve-hour day can end up with very little left. If you build your quote from the event's total direct cost rather than from the menu alone, the food cost percentage tends to take care of itself.
Why do caterers lose money even with a good food cost percentage?
The most common reasons are quoting from last year's ingredient prices, under-estimating on-site staff hours, treating travel and equipment hire as rounding errors, and over-catering far beyond the allowance built into the quote. A caterer can hit a textbook 28% food cost and still lose money if staffing ran two hours over on four events that month. Food cost percentage measures one line of the profit and loss. Contribution per event — revenue minus food, staff, travel, hire and packaging — is the number that tells you whether the work was worth doing.
Further resources
- GOV.UK — VAT on food products (Notice 701/14)
- FSA — starting and running a food business
- Food cost percentage: the general formula and UK benchmarks
- Best catering management software for small UK businesses
- Catering profit margins: what's realistic in 2026
- Free recipe cost calculator (no signup)
- FoodCore catering management software
FoodCore is kitchen management software built for small UK food businesses. We handle recipe costing, Natasha's Law labels, allergen matrices and order tracking.
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