Dish recipes: the table, an example and what the law requires.

A recipe for a dish lists every ingredient of one portion with the exact quantity, the waste and the purchase price. It tells you what a portion costs you and what the dish's food cost is against its selling price. That makes the recipe the first step to food cost per dish.

In Croatia it is also a legal duty. When it is written only for the law, a recipe is usually a list of ingredients without prices. That list satisfies the law, but it does not tell you whether the dish makes money.

The Hospitality Industry Act (Zakon o ugostiteljskoj djelatnosti), Article 10(1)(4), requires four things of every operator.

1. Set a recipe for the use of ingredients for every dish, drink and beverage.
2. Serve dishes, drinks and beverages in the quantities and quality the recipe sets.
3. Keep the recipe on the premises during opening hours.
4. Show the recipe to a guest who asks for it.

Fines

Article 47 sets a fine of 330 to 2,650 EUR for a company or sole trader and 260 to 920 EUR for the responsible person in a company. For a repeat offence in the same venue the fine for a company or sole trader is 660 to 5,300 EUR. Except for a repeat offence, a tourism inspector can also collect a fine on the spot: 190 EUR from a company or sole trader and 130 EUR from the responsible person.

A draft of a new Hospitality Industry Act (P.Z.E. 315) passed its first reading in the Croatian Parliament on 3 July 2026. It explicitly allows recipes in digital form and sets higher fines, but it is not law yet.

Source: Zakon o ugostiteljskoj djelatnosti, NN 85/15, 121/16, 99/18, 25/19, 98/19, 32/20, 42/20, 126/21, 152/24.

A recipe table has six columns. If one is missing, the food cost it produces is wrong.

1. Ingredient, as you buy it from the supplier.
2. Net quantity per portion, what ends up on the plate.
3. Waste as a percentage, what is lost in cleaning, trimming and cooking.
4. Gross quantity, what leaves the storeroom. It is net divided by (1 - waste).
5. Unit of measure, matched to the price: grams against a price per kilogram, millilitres against a price per litre, pieces against a price per piece.
6. Purchase price per unit, excluding VAT, from the latest supplier invoice.

The seventh column calculates itself

Gross quantity times purchase price gives the ingredient cost per portion. The sum of that column is the cost of the portion. Divide it by the selling price excluding VAT and you have the dish's food cost as a percentage.

We email you the ready template with formulas, a blank sheet and three examples, in Excel and PDF: recipe costing template.

Build the first recipes together with your head chef, dish by dish. For a menu of about twenty dishes that is two shifts of work, and after that you maintain the recipes instead of writing them from scratch.

1. Weigh the portion as it really leaves the kitchen, not as it was planned. Weigh three portions in two different shifts and take the average.
2. Set the waste for each ingredient. Weigh the raw product before and after cleaning, the difference divided by the weight before cleaning is the waste percentage.
3. Enter the purchase price excluding VAT from the latest invoice, in the same unit of measure as the quantity.
4. Multiply the gross quantity by the price and add up all ingredients. Add one line for small items: oil, salt, spices and garnish.
5. Divide the cost of the portion by the selling price excluding VAT. That is the dish's food cost.

The waste in a recipe is best weighed in your own kitchen. As a reference you can use the rates from two decisions on the allowed level of shrinkage, spillage, spoilage and breakage in hospitality (Croatian "kalo, rastep, kvar i lom"): the HOK decision (NN 27/2024, corrected in NN 39/2024) and the HGK decision (NN 80/2024).

These decisions set how much shortage of goods is not taxed. They are not recipe rules and do not cap what a kitchen may lose. You set the recipe yourself, and the rates are a useful check on waste in preparation.

The rates are the same in both decisions and are a percentage of the gross quantity, the same as waste in the recipe table.

This is a recipe for one dish. The unit of measure sits with the quantity and the price, and the last column is the calculated cost. The prices are an example, yours come from your invoices.

Food cost of the portion

The portion costs 3.17 EUR. At a selling price of 12.50 EUR excluding VAT the food cost is 25.4%. That is below 30%, the threshold our food cost calculator also uses for most dishes.

The same dish without waste

Had the salmon been entered as 100 g instead of 114 g, the portion would cost 2.92 EUR and the food cost would look like 23.4%. Two percentage points do not show on the menu, but they show at the end of the month, when the storeroom has used more salmon than the recipes say.

The same dish after salmon goes up

The supplier raises salmon from 18 to 24 EUR/kg. The salmon in the portion now costs 2.74 EUR, the portion 3.86 EUR, and the food cost is 30.9%. One invoice moved the dish from the healthy range to the borderline one, and nothing on the menu changed. The menu price calculator shows the price the dish needs now: at a 30% food cost it is 12.87 EUR excluding VAT.

The most common model in spreadsheets is a price written straight into the dish's recipe. When salmon goes up, every salmon dish has a wrong food cost until someone goes through all the recipes by hand. In practice that happens once a year or never.

The right model: the price is kept once, with the ingredient, and recipes refer to the ingredient. A new price in one place changes every recipe that uses that ingredient.

That is how the Patrono food cost module works. You enter an ingredient's new price once, and when a purchase price rises or falls, the margin of every dish with that ingredient refreshes on its own, without waiting for month end. In the Directory each supplier is linked to the ingredients in your recipes.

A recipe with 100 g of salmon and a kitchen that serves 130 g are two different dishes. In the example above that is 34 g more gross salmon per portion, or 0.61 EUR. At 40 portions a week that is about 106 EUR a month, on one dish alone.

A scale on the pass and a photo of the plate next to the recipe solve most of it. Once a month compare the stock count with what should be left according to sales and recipes. A gap that grows month after month means portions are bigger than the recipe or stock is lost somewhere else.

Seven mistakes that make a recipe table show the wrong food cost.

• Waste is not entered, so food cost looks lower than it is.
• The purchase price is written into the dish, so it is outdated with the first new invoice.
• A purchase price including VAT is compared with a selling price excluding VAT. If you are VAT registered, calculate both sides without it.
• Small ingredients are left out. Oil, spices and garnish are cents on one portion, and on a month of sales they are an amount you can see.
• Units get mixed: price per kilogram, quantity in pieces, invoice in packs.
• Drinks and beverages have no recipe, although the law requires one for them too, and on cocktails and coffee food cost is lost just as easily.
• An old recipe is overwritten with a new one, so later nobody knows what the dish looked like when the margin was better.

When you change a recipe because the season started, because the supplier changed the price or because you changed how it is prepared, the old version stays in the archive and the new one gets the date it applies from.

The reason: when five months later you look at why the margin on a signature dish dropped, knowing what the recipe looked like at the time is the difference between analysis and guessing.

If you want to keep recipes with a margin that refreshes on its own, create an account and enter your first dish. Setup is 0 EUR and there is no commitment on the monthly plan.