Calculation of Food Cost Per Man Per Day (Man-Day)

Hi Joe,

I am really grateful for your prompt answer and the time you dedicated to answer my query. I apologize for not presenting full information as I had serious doubts I would receive an answer!

Allow me to present these facts:

1-My objective is to calculate the cost per man/ day ( breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight)

2-The known facts every day are :
a) the number of meals presented to the client which you have inserted in the first matrix
b) the total cost of the food ingredients for all meals together.

3-If the 4 meals presented every day cost = 10 then the Company base its calculation on the following ratio: Breakfast = 1.5, Lunch = 3.5, dinner = 2.5 and midnight = 2.5

Once again, I thank you dearly and look forward receiving your feed back.

Best regards
HT

I worked in the remote site feeding and support services division of Sodexo for 9 years. We tracked all of our costs per man-day. If you carefully track your cost of all ingredients each day and divide this sum by your manday count, you'll arrive at an actual cost per man-day.

The other meal level information is your standard cost data. You need to hit 10 per man-day and you have targets for each meal period. I would recommend you divide the day into two parts - Midnight/Breakfast (target is 4) and Lunch/Dinner (target is 6). You can isolate most operational problems and focus on a solution if you get closer to the actual variance.

You may find the 1.5 breakfast target is too low but the lunch target of 2.5 is too high. Of course, you could look at each meal independently each day.

On our camps, we served large beefsteaks twice a week. Workers (our customers) consumed over 5,000 calories per day. They were working hard in the frigid regions of Northern Canada and Alaska. Steak Nights were a major component of our food cost results. We knew the cost of the steaks served and the average number of steaks consumed since the impact was high.

We served buffet style meals in an all-you-can-eat format. Our guests were served the entree and sides by one of the chefs or cooks. All salads, desserts, rolls, etc. were self-serve. Beverages were self-serve.

Our team knew the cost of the salad bar, the dessert station, the beverage station and average condiment usage. The cost of the items served by our main line varied based on a cycle menu.

If your operation is similar to the one I described, I recommend using a week as your report period. Most cycle menus will begin to track a tight cost range for each week of the cycle. You will find great variations on the dinner meal period based on the day in the cycle and the cost of the protein and produce items.