Guides · Food cost

What should a fish & chip shop’s food cost be?

Ask ten chippy owners their food cost percentage and you’ll get three answers, five guesses and two blank looks. Yet it’s the single number that decides whether a busy Friday actually made you money.

The honest benchmark

A well-run UK fish & chip shop typically lands between 28% and 35% food cost — every £100 through the till costs £28–£35 in fish, potatoes, oil, batter and packaging. Under 28% and you’re either exceptional or under-portioning; consistently over 38% and the business is feeding its suppliers before it feeds you.

Fish is the swing factor. Cod and haddock prices move with quota decisions and fuel costs, and a 15% rise in fillet price can quietly add 2–3 points to your food cost in a single month — which is precisely why a number you calculated once last year tells you nothing today.

The three levers that actually work

1. Price the fish, not the menu. Most shops reprice once a year. Fish prices move weekly. Owners who track their per-portion fish cost and nudge the menu 20–40p when it drifts keep their margin; owners who wait for the annual reprice donate the difference.

2. Weigh the portion, twice a year. Portion creep is invisible day to day and expensive over a year: an extra 15g of chips per serving across 1,000 weekly orders is roughly 780kg of potatoes a year given away for free.

3. Watch the oil like a hawk. Oil is your third-biggest food line, and filtering discipline can stretch its life by days. If oil spend jumps without a busy week to explain it, something changed in the kitchen — find out what.

Why the maths goes wrong on paper

The classic mistake is dividing this week’s invoices by this week’s takings. Deliveries are lumpy — a big fish order on Thursday makes that week look terrible and the next week look brilliant, and both are wrong. The correct view spreads what you used across the days you were busy — which is tedious on paper and exactly the kind of thing software should do silently.