How to price your café menu

Pricing a café menu isn’t a dark art — it’s arithmetic plus a bit of nerve. Most small cafés underprice because they guess from the competition instead of their own costs. Here’s how to set prices that cover your costs, respect your customers and still leave something for you.

Start with the cost of the cup, not the café down the road

Work out what one item actually costs to make: beans, milk, cup, lid, and a slice of the things that are easy to forget — gas, wastage, the oat milk nobody finished. That number is your cost of goods. Everything else you price sits on top of it.

A simple rule of thumb

• Add up the direct cost of one item: ingredients plus packaging
• Multiply by three to four for food and drink — that margin pays for rent, wages and the quiet hours
• Round to a friendly price (3.40, not 3.37), so the queue moves and the maths stays simple
• Check it against your area: be the fair option, not the cheapest

Make the big sellers earn their keep

A handful of items make most of your money. Know which ones, put them where eyes land first, and pair them — a pastry with the morning coffee adds more to your day than a discount ever will.

Tapp helps with the knowing. Add what each item costs you in the menu editor, and the Product mix in Tapp’s analytics plots every menu item by popularity against profitability. Stars are popular and profitable: protect and promote them. Plowhorses sell well on a thin margin: raise the price or trim the cost. Puzzles earn well but rarely sell, and Dogs are low on both.