Oven Scars

Playbook tool

Prime Cost Health Check

Food plus labor as a share of sales — the fastest honest read on whether a week worked. Enter three numbers from your POS and see where you land against the published benchmarks.

About 5 minutes · Free · Nothing you type leaves your browser

Have these in front of you

  • Total sales for the week
  • Food cost (COGS) for the week
  • Total labor cost including payroll taxes

Your week

Net sales for one completed week.
Actual cost of goods used, not purchases.
Wages plus employer payroll taxes. Wage-only understates it.
What your recipe math says food should cost.
Prime cost

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40%55–60% benchmark80%
Food cost

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Labor cost

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Food cost variance

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Where to look first

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This calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your numbers are never sent to Oven Scars, never stored, and never logged. Close the tab and they are gone.

The method

How to run this properly

  1. Pull one week, not one month

    Take total sales, food cost, and fully loaded labor cost for a single completed week. A bad month is four bad weeks you did not catch, so the week is the unit that lets you act.

  2. Include payroll taxes in labor

    Labor means wages plus employer payroll taxes, and workers comp if you can get it cleanly. Wage-only labor understates the number and makes a shop look healthier than it is.

  3. Add food and labor, divide by sales

    Prime cost is (food + labor) ÷ sales. That single figure ends most arguments about whether the problem is the kitchen or the schedule, because it refuses to let you blame one in isolation.

  4. Compare to the benchmark, then find your own outlier

    Benchmarks are averages across formats. Use them to spot which of your two components is out of range, not to grade the shop as a whole against someone else’s model.

  5. Fix the schedule and the portion spec before the menu price

    If prime cost runs past the low sixties, audit the schedule against sales by daypart and re-spec your heaviest portions. Price increases are the last lever, not the first.

What this doesn’t do

Prime cost says nothing about rent, utilities, or debt service — a shop can hit 57% prime cost and still lose money on an occupancy cost it can only fix at the lease table. It also treats a slice shop and a family sit-down as the same animal, which they are not.

The reporting behind this tool

This calculator is the conclusion of an Oven Scars story, made executable. The article shows the worked example and links every figure to its primary source.

The Real Cost of Running a Pizza Shop