# Costing Fryer Oil?



## brisket (Jun 30, 2010)

Just opened a new pub restaurant with a buddy of mine and have no idea how to cost my fryer oil into my items.  Any help?


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## xjmrufinix (Mar 16, 2009)

I was taught to add approximately 2% cost to all recipes using pantry staples or very small amounts of an ingredient.


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## brisket (Jun 30, 2010)

2% eh?  Seems low to me.  Pantry staples like salt and pepper don't cost near as much as 40+ litres of fryer oil.


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## xjmrufinix (Mar 16, 2009)

If you're increasing cost by 2% across the board you'll be doing it in a lot of cases when 2% is overestimating (such as when you're marking up just for salt and pepper), unless you're going through a ton of oil it probably balances out. I don't go through a lot so it works for me. If you are going through a ton you could figure how much oil you go through in a week and adjust your cost for the whole week accordingly.


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## chefbillyb (Feb 8, 2009)

Lets say you have Popcorn Shrimp as an app, you sell that for $8, if you figured 2% for that one app, you would have to sell 250 of them to pay for a vat of oil, based on $40 a vat and oil being $30 for 35lbs.......................CBB


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## chefedb (Apr 3, 2010)

Hard to figure because it depends on how you keep the oil and how much use you get or days or hours or orders. The base however is  approx 35 pounds to a unit as purchased lets say $28..00 per so base price no matter what is 80 cents per lb.And this is the way it should be carriied at inventory.Everything in the  place is purchased by pound everything is portioned by lbs and ounces, even a stick of gum. This is only way to attain true food cost..Even a case of lettuce is by lb Iceburg should be 40lbs case divided into price gives you cost per lb.


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## xjmrufinix (Mar 16, 2009)

chefedb said:


> Hard to figure because it depends on how you keep the oil and how much use you get or days or hours or orders. The base however is approx 35 pounds to a unit as purchased lets say $28..00 per so base price no matter what is 80 cents per lb.And this is the way it should be carriied at inventory.Everything in the place is purchased by pound everything is portioned by lbs and ounces, even a stick of gum. This is only way to attain true food cost..Even a case of lettuce is by lb Iceburg should be 40lbs case divided into price gives you cost per lb.


I agree with that, 2% is not really accurate...but I'm an hourly employee with the sole responsibility for costing, I have to take short cuts sometimes rather than spend time figuring out how much we spend on salt in each menu item. My oil lasts two weeks because I don't use, and we have such a high mark-up on the few fried items we sell, that 2% covers my cost nine times out of ten. But you are right, we lose a little bit of control and clarity taking those short cuts.


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## chefedb (Apr 3, 2010)

The reason I don't like the 2% theory is . example salt added to a $4.99 pound of beef as adverse to salt added to a  $1.99 pound chicken dish. Amount of salt used The same but the salt you used on the beef at 2% cost you more then the 2% used on chicken When in fact salt came out of same container at same price.Beef would add about 10 cents  chicken would add about  4 cents. Making original box of salt quite expensive.It as you say is easier but not as acurate


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## prairiechef (May 22, 2010)

Easy;

How often do you change your oil? I do it every 2 days. Unless it's been used in such a way that I need to do it more often, but at a minimum, every 2 days.

I go back, Iook at my average cover count for a day, divide my $47-ish bucks (1 & 2/3 pails of High oleic fryer shortening) by the number of covers and presto... that's how much has to be added to each standard to cover my costs.

i.e.: If I average 200 covers a day, I end up with an oil consumption of $0.117 per cover.

Every single dish gets a $0.12 entry for fryer oil, translating to a price of $0.36 per menu item


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## tonyc (Feb 13, 2010)

I personally prefer a 10% addition to the prime food cost of each plate. Say I have $2.45 worth of protein, $0.47 worth of starch, and $0.84 worth of veg for a grand total of $3.76 prime plate cost. Add $0.38 to that cost and then figure out how much to charge (we always called it the p&q cost when I was in culinary school). So at 35% food cost, you should be charging $11.83 for the plate.

And before the flaming starts, my time is WAY to valuable to waste calculating the $0.01 worth of salt, fryer oil, etc... that goes into each dish. As well as accounting for the variations from cook to cook in making the same dish (which is there no matter how well your staff is trained). The 10% to prime costs I find covers all the little things very nicely.

In a scratch kitchen, my food cost for February was 27.18%


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## chefedb (Apr 3, 2010)

If you double strained wouldn't you get more life out of it ???


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## saucey (Apr 17, 2011)

you need to configure your AWC which is basically all items that you offer to guests that you do not charge such as sugar, cream, ketchup, a1 ...whatever so you can include them in your cost


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## r.shackleford (Jul 16, 2009)

Think of an number.... any number multply it by 12 and you may have get it correct. I find that fryer oil use has more to do with what is being cooked and how diligant your staff are on draining, straining and cleaning the fryer. I recently found that 1 of our 3 locations that use fryers was going through 2.5 times as much as the other 2, which can get expensive these days. The kitchen porter  would drop and change the oil daily instead of re-using it, and nobody cared, after all it's somebody else's job right?...... threats were made, tears were shed, heads rolled and we mopped up the blood so its all okay now.

Getting back to your original question. It's a fixed cost not a percentage of sales because you will use almost the same amount of oil if you are cooking 100lb of fries per day or per week so my advice would be setup a proper cleaning and changing schedule which will give you an idea of how much oil per week you will use (give or take 5%) and monitor your purchase of oil, the state of the fryer and the quality of the food.

Of course if your frying wings or calimari good luck... just think of that number again and multiply it by 30


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