Menu Costing Engine
Enter your bottle costs once. See your entire menu costed, priced, and margin-analyzed instantly. Solve for any target pour cost from 15% to 30%. This is the tool every bar owner should have run once a quarter and never has.
Pour cost — the ratio of ingredient cost to menu price — is the single most important number in your beverage program, and it's the number most bars don't actually know. The industry rule of thumb is 18–22% as a target. Most bars run 28–35% and don't realize it because their costing is back-of-envelope, their pricing is "what the competitor charges plus two dollars," and nobody has ever sat down and done the math drink by drink.
The engine below pulls every cocktail in this site's database, computes each one's true ingredient cost (house prep from your calculators + spirits at the wholesale prices you enter), recommends a menu price that hits your target pour cost, and shows you the gross margin per drink and per menu. Change the target pour cost slider and every price recomputes. Change a bottle cost and every drink that uses it recomputes.
How to read the numbers
Industry contextPour cost benchmarks
18% or lower — Aggressive. Possible in high-end programs with strong brand premium pricing. Customers should not notice you are running cheap.
20–22% — Industry standard for well-run cocktail bars. Healthy margin, defensible pricing, room for free pours, comps, and waste.
25–28% — Where most bars actually operate. Margin still works, but variance and waste are eating into the program.
30%+ — You are bleeding money. Either your costs are too high, your prices are too low, or your portion control is broken. Fix this in the next 90 days.
What this calculator does not account for
Labor cost. A bartender's time is real money. Cocktail-cost analysis below sets ingredient pour cost only; total cost of goods is usually 5–10 percentage points higher.
Spillage, comps, waste. Even the best programs lose 3–5% to spills, returns, mismeasurements, and the "buy a friend a drink" reality. Bake an extra 4% into your costing.
Garnish cost. A lime wedge, an orange peel, a sprig of mint — these add up. A well-garnished menu adds 5–8% to ingredient cost in aggregate.
Bottle yield variance. Free pour bartenders give 1.7 oz instead of 1.5 oz on average. This is well-documented and material. The tool assumes spec is honored; reality is messier.
Pour cost is the single most important number in your beverage program, and it's the number most bars don't actually know.
How to use this tool quarterly
A protocol- Pull this quarter's invoices. Get your last 90 days of spirit and modifier costs. Average them. Enter them in the editor above. Bottle prices fluctuate; your costing should track that.
- Set your target pour cost. If you're a high-end program in a strong market, 18%. If you're mid-market, 20%. If you're a value bar trying to drive volume, 22–25%. Be honest about which one you are.
- Compare current menu prices to recommended. The gap is your action item. Drinks running 5+ percentage points over target are candidates for repricing, recipe redesign, or removal.
- Identify the outliers. Drinks that hit your target perfectly are working. Drinks that come in well below target (high margin) are your stars — promote them. Drinks that come in well over target are bleeders — fix them.
- Make the changes. Menu repricing is a quarterly action, not a one-time event. Customers absorb $1 increases without notice; $3 increases get pushback. Move incrementally.
- Document the result. Track gross margin per night before and after the changes. The point of this whole exercise is to move that number.