How much food to buy for your meal prep orders.

Write down what one meal uses

Start with what one serving uses. Chicken shrinks in the oven and rice grows in the pot, so what you serve is not what you buy.

Weigh one batch before and after cooking, and write the result down. If 10 pounds of raw chicken comes out at 7 pounds, you keep 70% of it. If 1 pound of dry rice comes out at 3 pounds, every 3 pounds you serve takes 1 pound from the bag. Use your own numbers, because they change with your cut, your oven and your cook.

Work from the order totals to the shopping list

Take the counts from your prep list, and do the same five steps for each ingredient. Here is chicken, using a sample week of 106 meals. A smaller kitchen gets smaller numbers from the same steps.

1. Multiply the amount in one meal by how many you sold.
2. Add the amounts across every meal that uses it.
3. Divide by what you keep after cooking. 310 oz ÷ 0.7 is about 443 oz, and 443 ÷ 16 is 27.7 pounds raw.
4. Add a small buffer, for a dropped tray or a late order.
5. Round up to what your supplier or store sells. Here that is 3 bags of 10 pounds.

Keep one unit for each ingredient, because cups and ounces will not add up on the same line. If a recipe says cups, weigh one cup once, and write down what it weighs.

Take off what you already have

Before you place the order, count what is left from last week. Do this on the same day each week, or the number means little. Half a bag of rice on the shelf is half a bag you don't need to pay for.

Then split the list by what spoils. Dry goods and packaging can come in a bigger order every few weeks. Proteins and produce should come as close to cook day as your supplier allows.

Keep your buffer honest

A buffer is there to cover mistakes, and it is easy to let it grow. Once a month, compare what you bought with what the orders needed. If you keep throwing the same 5 pounds away, cut your buffer by 5 pounds. Food you throw away is still in your food cost, so this shows up in your margin too.

If you use a supplier, their lead time matters as well. If they need 2 days and you close orders the night before prep, you are buying before you know the totals. That is a reason to move your cutoff. If you shop at a store the morning you cook, this won't touch you.

Build the sheet once

Two tabs and a pivot table will do this for a small menu, and you only set them up once.

1. A Recipes tab. One row for each ingredient in each meal: the meal in column A, the ingredient in B and the amount in one meal in C, in a single unit.
2. A Counts tab. The meal in column A and how many you sold this week in B, from your prep list. Every meal on the Recipes tab needs a row here, with a 0 if it didn't sell, or the formula below shows an error.
3. A total on each recipe row. In D2 of the Recipes tab, multiply the amount by the count, then fill it down: =C2*VLOOKUP(A2, Counts!A:B, 2, FALSE).
4. A pivot table on the Recipes tab. Put the ingredient under Rows and the sum of column D under Values. That is what the week's orders need of each ingredient. In Excel, choose Refresh All on the Data tab each time you change the counts, because the pivot table won't update by itself.

From there, run steps 3 to 5 above on each line. When a sauce goes into three meals, give it a row under each meal, in the amount that meal uses. When the menu changes, add rows for the new meal and leave the others alone.

A general online store won't do this part for you: it knows what you sold, and it doesn't know what goes into it.

The Eat Fresh Tech way

Here's how we turn your orders into a shopping list.

You enter each recipe once and link it to its meal. After that, the shopping list comes from the orders.

• The Grocery List Report adds up every ingredient for a menu's orders. An ingredient used in several recipes becomes one line, and units are converted where they can be, so cups and quarts land on the same line.
• It warns you about gaps. A meal with no recipe gets a warning, so it doesn't quietly go missing from your list.
• Sub-recipes let a sauce sit inside other recipes. Fix it once, and the list follows.

The list tells you how much the orders need, and the buying stays your call. To have the list read in what you buy, enter raw amounts in your recipes. Then take off what's on your shelf, and round up to your supplier's sizes.

How prep reports work →