Chicken Tikka Masala Cost Calculator
Indian restaurant favorite - marinated grilled chicken in creamy tomato sauce. Food cost per entrée portion. Prefilled with US average ingredient costs. Edit any quantity or price to match what you actually pay, and the math updates as you type.
How much does it cost to make Chicken Tikka Masala?
About $3.30 of ingredients per plate at typical 2026 US foodservice prices. The 8 oz of chicken thigh is $1.28, the biggest single line; sauce and marinade add $1.78 and rice $0.24. The sauce is batch-cooked to a fixed recipe, so the chicken portion sets the margin.
Where the money goes
| Chicken thigh boneless | 38.8% · $1.28 | |
|---|---|---|
| Tomato sauce base | 25.5% · $0.84 | |
| Heavy cream | 15.2% · $0.50 | |
| Yogurt marinade | 7.3% · $0.24 | |
| Basmati rice (cooked) | 7.3% · $0.24 | |
| Spice blend (garam masala) | 6.1% · $0.20 |
What 40 of them return at different prices
| Your price | Food cost % | Over ingredients, each | Over ingredients, 40 |
|---|---|---|---|
| $13.50 | 24.4% | $10.20 | $408.00 |
| $18.00 US average | 18.3% | $14.70 | $588.00 |
| $22.50 | 14.7% | $19.20 | $768.00 |
Ingredients only. Labor, packaging, fuel, and stall or platform fees come out of these figures.
Chicken tikka masala costs out as two parts that the kitchen handles differently: a sauce cooked by the pot and chicken portioned by the plate. The 8 oz of boneless chicken thigh is $1.28, 38.8% of the $3.30 plate. The sauce and marinade are $1.78, 53.9%: $0.84 of tomato sauce base, $0.50 of heavy cream, $0.24 of yogurt for the marinade, and $0.20 of garam masala and spices. The basmati rice adds $0.24, and naan is not in this cost; most places sell it as a separate side. At an $18 menu price the plate runs 18.3%, well under the 25-30% most restaurants aim for on a curry, which leaves room for a lower menu price or a bigger portion.
The sauce is why that number holds steady. A 40-plate pot follows a fixed recipe: 15 lb of tomato sauce base and the spices, cooked once and ladled out through service. Many kitchens keep the cream out of the pot and finish each pan with it to order, so the base keeps for three or four days in the fridge and what is left at close goes into tomorrow's pot instead of the bin. Batch cooking makes this half of the plate predictable: once the pot is costed, every plate carries the same $1.78.
The chicken is where the plate drifts. Boneless thigh costs about 16 cents an ounce from a foodservice distributor, so every ounce is close to a full point of food cost at $18. Cooked tikka usually sits in one hotel pan and goes into the sauce by the handful, and a handful has no fixed weight. Keeping the chicken in 8 oz portions from raw to plate, one skewer per order through the marinade and the grill, takes that drift out. Thigh is also the safer cut here. Boneless breast costs about the same in 2026, around 18 cents an ounce, which would put the plate at $3.46 and 19.2%, but breast dries out while it waits in the pan. The calculator above takes your own chicken price and portion.