How to price a tiffin service (with the actual math)
Most tiffin kitchens price by looking at what everyone else charges, then wonder where the money went. Here is the arithmetic that tells you what you should charge.
· 4 MIN READ
Ask a tiffin owner how they set their price and the answer is almost always the same: the kitchen down the road charges $180 a month, so they charge $175. That is not pricing. That is copying someone else's guess and shaving it.
Here is how to work it out from your own numbers.
Start with the cost of one meal
Not one week. Not one month. One meal. Every useful number in this business is per-meal, because that is the unit you actually produce.
Cook one day's menu, weigh what goes in, and price it from your last grocery receipt. A worked example for a typical veg tiffin — dal, a sabzi, rice, four rotis, salad:
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| Dal (lentils, onion, tomato, spices) | $0.95 |
| Sabzi (seasonal vegetable, oil, spices) | $1.35 |
| Rice | $0.40 |
| 4 rotis (flour, oil) | $0.55 |
| Salad / pickle / chutney | $0.35 |
| Container, lid, bag, label | $0.90 |
| Total food + packaging | $4.50 |
Apply the food-cost percentage
Food cost as a share of revenue is the single most useful ratio in any food business. Target 30%. Above 35% and the margin gets thin enough that one bad month hurts; below 25% and you are probably either underfeeding people or charging enough that you will lose them.
The arithmetic is simply your per-meal cost divided by your target percentage:
| Food cost per meal | At 30% | At 33% | At 35% |
|---|---|---|---|
| $4.00 | $13.33 | $12.12 | $11.43 |
| $4.50 | $15.00 | $13.64 | $12.86 |
| $5.00 | $16.67 | $15.15 | $14.29 |
| $5.50 | $18.33 | $16.67 | $15.71 |
So the $4.50 meal above wants to sell for about $15. If you are currently charging $10 a meal for it, you are running a 45% food cost and paying for the privilege of feeding people.
Now check it against everything else you pay
Food cost is not your only cost. The rest of the stack has to fit inside the other 70%, so write it down monthly and divide by your meal volume. For a kitchen doing 100 meals a day, 26 days a month — 2,600 meals:
| Cost | Monthly | Per meal |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen rent or commissary hours | $1,800 | $0.69 |
| Cooking labour | $4,200 | $1.62 |
| Driver(s) and fuel | $2,600 | $1.00 |
| Software, phone, bank and card fees | $450 | $0.17 |
| Utilities, cleaning, misc. | $600 | $0.23 |
| Total overhead | $9,650 | $3.71 |
Add that to the $4.50 of food and packaging and one meal costs you $8.21 to put on a doorstep. At $15 that is a contribution of $6.79 a meal, or about 45% gross margin — a healthy tiffin business.
At $10 a meal it is $1.79, which is a job you are paying to keep.
Find your break-even
Fixed costs divided by contribution per meal tells you how many meals a day you need before you earn anything. Using the numbers above, with rent, labour and software treated as fixed:
- Fixed costs: $9,650 a month
- Contribution at $15/meal: $10.50 (price minus the $4.50 that varies with volume)
- Break-even: 9,650 ÷ 10.50 = 919 meals a month, about 35 a day
Every meal past 35 a day is profit. That single number is worth more than any forecast — it tells you whether you are running a business or a hobby, and it tells you exactly how many customers you need.
Price the plan, not the month
Once you know your per-meal price, build plans from it rather than inventing round monthly numbers:
| Plan | Meals | Per meal | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trial week | 5 | $15.00 | $75 |
| Two weeks | 10 | $14.50 | $145 |
| Monthly | 22 | $13.75 | $302 |
| Monthly, both meals | 44 | $13.20 | $580 |
The discount for commitment is real but small. It rewards the customers who make your volume predictable without giving away the margin you just calculated.
Raise prices annually, in small steps
Ingredient costs move every year and tiffin kitchens are notorious for absorbing that until the margin is gone. A 4–6% increase once a year, announced two weeks ahead with a note about ingredient costs, loses almost nobody. Waiting three years and then raising 20% loses a lot of people at once.
Watch the ratio, not the bank balance
A bank balance tells you what happened. Food cost percentage tells you what is happening. If it drifts from 30% to 38% you want to know in week two — when it is a supplier price change or a portioning problem you can still fix — not at year end.
Tiffinware's profit and loss report computes revenue minus expenses, margin and food-cost percentage over any date range, and trends it, so the drift shows up on its own. There is also an items and plan economics view that shows revenue per plan and which dishes are actually carrying the menu. You can open the live demo without signing up.
Price from your costs. Check the ratio monthly. Raise a little every year. That is the whole discipline.