January - April 2025
How to Interpret the Cost of a Shopping List
When you create a menu and save it, NYC produces a shopping list that includes ingredients and quantities from the recipes in the menu. When you press the List Cost toolbutton, NYC produces a cost to prepare those recipes based on the exact ingredients and quantities in your shopping list (Shopping… List…), using prices for store items in your price list (Shopping… Prices…). NYC’s cost does NOT reflect the cost of store quantities that you must buy (to do so would assume that you are out of everything). In other words, NYC produces the cost of the 1 oz of flour needed for your recipe, NOT the 5 lb bag you may need to buy at the store. Some may ask why not total the cost of the store units, but NYC does not know if you would buy the 5 lb bag or the 10 lb bag of flour – there is no single store unit that everyone buys.
NYC uses store units and prices to compute the cost of each shopping list item and quantity, provided suitable units conversions are available in your conversions list (see Shopping Conversions). You can easily test the cost calculation by creating a menu from a recipe with one ingredient. For example, suppose your test recipe calls for 1 cup of flour and you have created a menu with only this recipe and saved. Your resulting shopping list will then include only the one item: 1 cup of flour. Press the List Cost button and you see one item and its shopping list quantity, as well as the low-cost store item from among the stores for which you have price data. So if your price list has a price of $6.50 for a bag (5 lb) of flour, NYC calculates the cost of 1 cup flour as:
1 cup flour x 0.52 lb / cup x $6.50 / 5 lb = $0.68
where the conversion 0.52 lb / cup was found as a generic item in your conversions list. NYC’s cost calculation thus reflects the cost of 1 cup flour, and NOT the cost of the 5 lb bag of flour.
Note that a unit conversion between a volume (e.g., cup) and a mass (e.g., lb) are typically based on the density of water. Flour is less dense so a cup of flour weighs less than a cup of water. This is why it is always better to use mass units (oz, lb, g, mg) in your recipes rather than volume units (tablespoon, teaspoon, cup, liter). A better cost can be had by including an item-specific unit in your conversions list, such as ‘flour 1 cup = 0.266 lb’. With such a conversion available in your conversions list, the cost would have been calculated as:
1 cup flour x 0.266 lb / cup x $6.50 / 5 lb = $0.35 which is a truer cost for a cup of flour than the above $0.68, which was based on flour weighing same as water.
The good news is that the cost calculation will be consistent across stores even if you use a mass-to-volume conversion vs mass-to-mass conversion, or whether you use a generic vs an item-specific conversion. NYC always checks for an item-specific conversion before it checks for a generic conversion.