Enter your daily customer count and average ticket and get a full monthly P&L for your donut or pastry shop — food cost, labor, overhead, and net margin all in one screen.
You sell a glazed for $1.75 and feel like a robber baron until the flour invoice, the lease, and a kid you pay $14 an hour to run the register all clear the account on the same Tuesday. Donut-shop math is the cruelest kind: every item is cheap, the volume is high, and the profit hides in two decimal places — your food cost percentage and whether daily foot traffic actually covers the rent. This calculator takes the numbers you already know off your POS and turns them into a real monthly profit figure, not a vibe.
You enter Customers Per Day, Working Days Per Month, Average Ticket, Food Cost percentage, Labor Cost percentage, and three flat overhead lines. The tool returns gross revenue, dollar amounts for each cost category, and net profit with a margin percentage. Change one input and the whole picture updates instantly — no spreadsheet required.
Why prime cost kills more donut shops than rent does
Prime cost — food plus labor as a combined percentage of revenue — is the single most important number in any food business. For a donut shop, prime cost above 65% leaves so little room for rent and overhead that a slow week can push you into the red. The calculator surfaces this by summing food cost and labor cost in dollars before subtracting fixed overhead, so you can see exactly where the pinch point is.
A shop doing 80 customers a day at a $9 average ticket generates about $19,000 in monthly gross revenue. At 35% food cost and 28% labor, prime cost sits at $12,000 — leaving $7,000 to cover rent, utilities, insurance, and marketing before a dollar of profit. That math works in a low-rent location. It stops working the moment you sign a $5,500 lease.
The tool lets you slide food cost and labor independently. A four-point drop in food cost on $19,000 in revenue is roughly $760 per month — real money. Running that experiment takes five seconds here versus a half-hour reworking a spreadsheet.
What average ticket actually drives in a donut business
Most donut shop owners think in units — donuts, muffins, beverages. The calculator thinks in average ticket, which is total revenue divided by total customers. A customer who buys two donuts and a coffee at $9.50 is worth 60% more than a customer who grabs a single donut for $2. Average ticket is the lever that matters most because it does not require you to find new customers.
Bundling is the fastest way to raise it. A coffee-and-donut combo, a half-dozen box, or an add-on pastry at the register can push the average ticket from $5 to $8 without increasing foot traffic. Enter your current average, then test what a $2 increase does to your monthly net. On 80 customers a day over 26 working days, that $2 is $4,160 in extra monthly gross — more than many shops make in net profit total.
Keep the average honest. Use a real number from your POS over a typical week, not a record Saturday. An inflated ticket makes the model look healthier than reality, which defeats the whole point.
Fixed overhead: the number that does not move when rain does
Rent, utilities and insurance, and marketing are entered as flat monthly dollar amounts. They do not flex with customer volume. This separation is deliberate — it lets you see exactly how much gross revenue you must generate every month just to reach zero. Below that line you are losing money on every working day.
A shop with $4,500 in monthly overhead needs to clear that amount before food and labor costs are paid. At a 37% combined prime cost, you need roughly $7,100 in gross revenue to break even on overhead alone. That is about 31 customers per day at a $9 ticket over 26 days. Knowing that number means you can answer a real question: is a slow Tuesday still covering overhead, or is it quietly costing you?
Marketing shows up here as a fixed line because most shop owners spend a fixed monthly amount — boosted posts, loyalty app subscription, local ads — regardless of how the week went. If you are not spending anything on marketing yet, enter zero and note how much margin you have to invest before you eat into profit.
Reading the Business Verdict and Smart Insights
After you enter your inputs, the tool produces a Business Verdict — a plain-English read on whether your shop is profitable, razor-thin, or losing money. It also flags when prime cost crosses into dangerous territory (above 65%) or when profit margin is strong enough to sustain growth. These are not generic observations; they fire based on your actual numbers.
The Smart Insights panel surfaces specific actions: if your food cost percentage is high, it tells you what dollar amount a three-point improvement would recover. If your no-show or cancellation rate is cutting into revenue, it quantifies that loss. Treat these as a diagnostic, not a verdict — the model cannot know your local lease market or whether your supplier just raised flour prices.
The Projections tab shows revenue and profit at different customer volumes, which is useful for capacity planning. If you are considering adding a second shift or extending weekend hours, plug in the additional customers per day and see whether the incremental revenue justifies the labor.
When to run this before a pricing or staffing decision
Before raising prices: enter the new average ticket, note the net profit increase, then mentally subtract the customers you might lose. The tool cannot predict churn, but it shows how much volume you can afford to drop before the price increase stops being worth it. On a 10% price bump from $9 to $9.90, you could lose about 8% of customers and still come out ahead.
Before adding a part-time employee: increase your labor cost percentage by the equivalent monthly dollars divided by current gross revenue, and watch what happens to net. A $1,200-per-month part-time hire might drop your margin from 14% to 7% — healthy if it lets you open longer, bad if you are already near breakeven. Run the numbers before you make the offer.
Donut shop owners who model before they decide consistently make better calls than those who find out later on the bank statement. Run it before the next big call — price increase, lease renewal, or staffing change — and bring numbers instead of intuition to that conversation.
How to use it
- Enter Customers Per Day and Working Days Per Month — use your real monthly average, not your best week.
- Set Average Ticket ($) to what a typical customer spends across donuts, pastries, beverages, and any add-ons.
- Adjust the Food Cost (%) and Labor Cost (%) inputs to match your actual books; include your own wage in labor.
- Enter Monthly Rent, Monthly Utilities and Insurance, and Monthly Marketing as flat dollar amounts.
- Read the Per Customer Profit, Profit Margin, and Monthly Revenue in the summary cards, then use the Projections tab to test different volume or pricing scenarios.
Who it's for
- New shop owner sizing a lease — Models whether 60 customers per day at a $10 average ticket can support a $4,200 monthly rent before signing, avoiding a commitment that only works at peak volume.
- Owner considering a combo menu add — Tests what raising average ticket from $6.50 to $9 via coffee-and-donut bundles does to monthly profit — finds an extra $3,100 per month without adding a single new customer.
- Multi-location operator benchmarking locations — Enters each store's numbers separately to compare net margins side by side and identify which location has a food cost problem versus an overhead problem.
- Shop preparing a bank loan package — Uses the Export to CSV function to produce a clean monthly profit projection for a lender rather than submitting a hand-built spreadsheet.
- Owner evaluating extended hours — Adds the projected extra customers from a 6 AM opening, increases labor cost proportionally, and checks whether the incremental margin justifies the earlier shift.
Key terms
- Prime cost
- The combined total of food cost and labor cost as a percentage of gross revenue. The primary profitability lever in any food-service business.
- Average ticket
- Total revenue divided by total customer transactions. Measures the typical spend per visit, not per item. Raising average ticket is usually faster than finding new customers.
- Fixed overhead
- Costs that stay constant regardless of sales volume — rent, utilities, insurance, and marketing in this model. These must be covered before any net profit exists.
- Net margin
- Net profit expressed as a percentage of gross revenue. For a donut shop, a healthy net margin typically falls between 8% and 18% once the owner is paying themselves.
- Breakeven
- The gross revenue level at which all costs — food, labor, and overhead — are exactly covered and net profit is zero. Knowing this number drives better pricing and scheduling decisions.
Frequently asked questions
What should I enter as Average Ticket for a donut shop?
Divide your total monthly revenue by total customer transactions — not units sold. A customer buying a half-dozen and a coffee is one transaction. Pull this from your POS over a normal week, not a holiday or catering order, so the projection stays realistic.
What is a healthy food cost percentage for a donut shop?
Ingredient cost for most donut and pastry operations lands between 28% and 38% of revenue. Shops that bake everything from scratch tend to run closer to 32–38%; shops using pre-made mix or par-baked product can get to 26–30%. Above 40% and you will struggle to cover labor and overhead unless your average ticket is very high.
Should I include my own wages in the labor cost percentage?
Yes, always. The most common reason a donut shop looks more profitable than it is comes from the owner leaving their own pay out of the labor line. If you are working 50 hours a week and not counting it, your margin is flattering fiction. Load a real market wage for your hours and the net profit number becomes honest.
What does prime cost mean and why does it matter here?
Prime cost is the combined percentage of food cost and labor cost relative to gross revenue. In food service, keeping prime cost below 60–65% is the standard target for a healthy operation. Above that, there is not enough margin left to cover fixed overhead and still profit. The calculator shows you this number implicitly through the profit margin output.
Can I use this for a donut shop that also does catering or wholesale?
Yes — include catering and wholesale revenue in your effective Average Ticket calculation, or add those dollars to your daily customer revenue total. The model works on total gross revenue against total costs, so any revenue stream you factor into the inputs will be reflected in the profit output.
How do I find my breakeven customer count with this tool?
Go to the Projections tab and look at the Profit at Different Customer Volumes table. Find the row where net profit crosses from negative to positive — that is your monthly breakeven. Divide by Working Days Per Month to get your daily breakeven customer count.