Portioning Savings Calculator

Over-portioning is serving more than the dish's standard recipe specifies, for example plating 140g of pasta when the spec is 110g. Those extra grams cost real money on every plate. Multiplied across thousands of covers a year, a 30g overshoot on a single dish can quietly cost over a thousand euros, all of it pure margin lost before the customer even decides whether to finish the plate.

Take the extra grams served above standard, convert to kilograms, multiply by the ingredient cost per kilogram, and multiply by the number of covers of that dish per year. The formula is (extra grams / 1000) x cost per kg x covers. The calculator runs this per dish so you can see which menu items leak the most margin through generous plating.

Plate waste is the food guests leave uneaten and that goes in the bin. It is estimated as the served weight times the average leftover percentage, converted to kilograms, times the ingredient cost, times covers. Larger portions tend to increase plate waste, so over-portioning and plate waste often compound each other, which is why the calculator adds both into the total saving.

Use scales and standard portion tools during prep and service, write portion specs into recipe cards, and bring servings back to a tested standard rather than cutting them below it. The aim is to remove waste, not to short the guest. Because the saving is per dish and per cover, even modest, unnoticed corrections on a few high-volume items can add up to a substantial annual figure.

Yes, the calculator estimates the CO2 avoided alongside the euros, since less food produced and binned means lower emissions. That CO2 figure is indicative and depends on the ingredient and its production source and region, so use it for context rather than as a precise environmental claim.