Find cost per pound after trimming and cooking loss.
Shelf price is per pound of raw chicken as sold, and you eat considerably less than that. Bone-in, skin-on pieces lose roughly a fifth to a third of their weight to bone, skin and trim, and whatever survives then loses another quarter to shrinkage as water and fat render out during cooking. Multiplying those two losses together means a whole bird at $3.20 a pound delivers cooked meat at closer to $5.40 — a seventy percent markup that never appears on the label. This is also the honest way to compare cuts: boneless breast at $6 a pound with only ten percent trim loss can genuinely beat bone-in thighs at $3, even though the sticker says otherwise.
Cooked yield and true cost per pound
Trimmed weight = raw weight x (1 - trim loss / 100); cooked weight = trimmed weight x (1 - cooking loss / 100); cost per cooked pound = total cost / cooked weight
Cost estimates only. Poultry must be cooked to an internal temperature of 74 C (165 F) throughout to be safe, regardless of yield or shrinkage, and raw chicken should be handled to avoid cross-contamination. Follow your local food safety guidance.
Often, but by much less than the shelf price suggests. Run the numbers with realistic losses for each cut — around 25% trim for bone-in against 5-10% for boneless — and the gap frequently narrows to almost nothing.
Because muscle is roughly seventy percent water and the proteins contract as they set, squeezing it out. Higher temperatures and longer cooking expel more, which is why gently cooked chicken yields noticeably better.
For cost per edible pound, yes. But bones make stock worth real money, so if you use them the effective cost is lower than shown — treat the figure here as the pessimistic case.