Costing Cheese on a Cafe Menu
Work in grams, not slices
A slice is not a unit. It changes with the knife, with the day, and with whoever is on the bench. Different cooks working from the same block will send out different plates, and your margin moves with them.
So put the slice aside and work in grams. Decide what a serve weighs, write it down, and hold it there. A ploughman's plate, a toastie, the lid on a gratin — each gets a weight, and that weight is the thing you cost.
Grams also let you compare cheeses without guessing. A firmer cheese and a softer one behave differently under a knife, but on a set of scales they are the same conversation.
Our retail packs are a useful reference for the scale. Traditional Dutch Gouda Cheese is packed at 280 g, and so is Dutch Maasdam Cheese 280g. Pick one up and you have a feel for what that weight looks like in a hand.
What a whole wheel gives you
We bring Dutch cheese into New Zealand as whole wheels, cut it fresh here, and deliver nationwide. The cutting happens in Auckland, which is the part that matters to a kitchen.
A wheel that has not been cut yet is still a decision waiting to be made. It can become slabs for a slicer, blocks sized to a shift, wedges for a board, or portions that go straight onto a plate. Cut formats match your portions, not the other way around. That is the whole argument for buying from a wheel rather than from a shelf.
It changes how the cheese moves through your kitchen, too. A block cut to the size you actually get through means fewer opened packs sitting in the chiller drying at the edges. It means less handling, less time on the bench, and less of the quiet trimming that nobody records anywhere.
If you are pricing cheese in bulk for a cafe, that is the lever worth pulling first: not a cheaper cheese, but a format that fits your service. You can see what we cut for kitchens on Wholesale Gouda for NZ Foodservice.
The sum, and what goes in it
The sum itself is short. Take the price you pay per kilogram, scale it down to a price per gram, and multiply by the grams in a serve. That gives you the cheese cost of one plate.
The price in that sum is yours, off your own invoice. Use the landed figure, the one that includes freight and anything else you pay to get the cheese through your back door, because that is what you actually spend.
Then look at what sits around the sum. Trim you throw away. The minutes someone spends portioning. The chiller space a delivery takes up. Over-portioning, which is the cost that shows up on the plate and never on paper.
Run the sum for a serve, then for a week of serves, then for the dish you sell the most of. The number that surprises you is usually the one worth acting on. Most of the time it is not the price per kilogram. It is the grams.
Where the waste goes
Waste hides. It leaves in small amounts and never gets counted, so a cheese that looks well priced on the invoice can be an expensive one on the menu.
It goes in a few directions. Rind and trim. Dried edges on a block that has been opened for too long. Crumbs and offcuts from a slicer. Grated cheese made ahead and not used. And portions that drift heavier than the ones you costed, which is the largest leak in most kitchens.
Some of that is fixable on the bench. Portion to the scales until the hand learns the weight. Grate to order where you can. Keep opened cheese wrapped tight and use it in order.
The rest is fixable at the order. Cut formats that match your portions mean lower waste, because there is less to trim and less to lose. Ask for the format you need before you ask for a better price.
Getting a price for your volume
Tell us the cheese, the format you want it cut to, and roughly what you go through in a week. That is enough for us to price it properly for your kitchen.
If you are ready to start, Apply for a Wholesale Account and we will come back to you.