Calculate the exact cost of each meal from its ingredients.
Costing a meal properly means counting three things people routinely leave out. The obvious one is the priced ingredients. The second is pantry consumption — the oil the onions were fried in, the salt, the stock cube, the tablespoon of soy sauce — which is individually trivial and collectively adds a fifth to the cost of many home dishes. The third is trim: you pay for the weight of broccoli stalks, chicken skin, onion skins and potato peel, but you serve only what survives preparation, so a recipe with heavy trim losses costs more per plate than its receipt suggests. Dividing the full cost by servings gives the figure worth comparing against a takeaway.
Cost per serving including pantry and trim
Total cost = ingredient cost + pantry cost; cost per meal = total cost / servings; trim cost = ingredient cost x waste percent / 100
Because they are consistent and they add up. Two tablespoons of olive oil, a stock cube and seasoning easily reach a dollar per dish, which is 20-25% on a cheap family meal — enough to change whether cooking beats a supermarket ready meal.
Weigh what you buy and what goes into the pot. Common figures are 5-10% for root vegetables, 15-25% for broccoli and cauliflower, and 25-35% for bone-in chicken. Guessing 8% is reasonable for mixed home cooking.
Not in a food cost, but be aware of it when comparing with takeaway. Forty minutes of cooking is real, which is why this shows the plate cost honestly and leaves the value of your time to you.