How it costs your menu, where the prices come from, and who it's made for.
Questions
They're the average prices Stats NZ records in shops. If you buy some of your stock at the supermarket, they'll be close. If you buy wholesale, enter what you paid once, and we move that price with the market from then on.
Monthly. Stats NZ releases its food prices around the middle of each month, and your email goes out that day. This isn't a live price feed.
About 150 items, including butter, eggs, cream, cheese, mince, chicken breast, lamb, bacon, flour, rice, olive oil and most fresh fruit and vegetables. Anything else keeps the price you typed.
No. Just your dishes and what goes in them. If you don't know the amounts, it drafts them from the dish name, marked as a draft for you to fix.
Stats NZ's prices do. We show your cost with GST or without, whichever matches how you price.
Yes. Pick the dish, the new price and the date, and it drafts a short notice for your customers.
$49 a month. The first 7 days are free with no card, and you can cancel any time.
Businesses only.
Where the prices come from
Each month Stats NZ publishes the Selected price indexes, with weighted average prices for about 150 food items in New Zealand shops, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. menucostly.shop reads them on release day and matches each of your ingredients to its series. A near match says so; anything untracked keeps the price you type.
These are retail prices, with GST. Where you enter what you actually paid (say butter, 1kg, $13.50, on a date), that becomes your base, and Stats NZ's change since that month moves it, labelled as such.
menucostly.shop isn't run by Stats NZ or affiliated with it.
Who it's for
Butter, eggs, cream and bacon: the brunch menu and the cabinet.
Flour, butter, sugar and eggs, where a block of butter changes every batch.
Bread, ham, cheese, chicken and salad: margins measured in cents.
Potatoes, oil, mince and fish, sold at prices people remember.