Falafel Pita Wrap Cost Calculator
Mediterranean wrap with falafel, hummus, vegetables, and tahini sauce. Food truck / fast-casual food cost. 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 Falafel Pita Wrap?
About $2.88 of ingredients per wrap at foodservice prices, 26.2% of an $11 menu price. Four premade falafel balls are the biggest cost at $1.20. The falafel and the hummus are both made from chickpeas; made in house from dried ones, they bring the wrap down to about $1.84.
Where the money goes
| Falafel balls | 41.7% · $1.20 | |
|---|---|---|
| Pita bread | 24.3% · $0.70 | |
| Hummus | 15.3% · $0.44 | |
| Lettuce + tomato + cucumber + onion | 12.5% · $0.36 | |
| Tahini sauce | 6.3% · $0.18 |
What 80 of them return at different prices
| Your price | Food cost % | Over ingredients, each | Over ingredients, 80 |
|---|---|---|---|
| $8.25 | 34.9% | $5.37 | $429.60 |
| $11.00 US average | 26.2% | $8.12 | $649.60 |
| $13.75 | 20.9% | $10.87 | $869.60 |
Ingredients only. Labor, packaging, fuel, and stall or platform fees come out of these figures.
The falafel is the biggest line: four premade balls at 30 cents each come to $1.20, 41.7% of the cost. The pita is next at 70 cents (24.3%). Then come 2 oz of hummus at 22 cents an ounce (44 cents, 15.3%), 3 oz of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and onion (36 cents, 12.5%), and an ounce of tahini sauce (18 cents, 6.3%). That totals $2.88, a 26.2% food cost at an $11 menu price, low for a wrap because the protein is a legume, not meat. The number of balls sets the portion. Each ball adds 30 cents, about 2.7 percentage points of food cost, and because balls are counted rather than weighed, the portion drifts less than a scoop of meat does. Six balls at the same $11 bring the cost to $3.48, a 31.6% food cost.
Thirty cents is the price of a frozen, ready-formed ball of about 0.8 oz. Peppo Foods falafel balls are $62.99 for 11 lb at WebstaurantStore, or 36 cents an ounce. Grecian Delight falafel dough, which you scoop and fry in house, is 29 cents an ounce, about 23 cents a ball. Made from dried chickpeas, the same ball costs about a third of the frozen one's 30 cents. Dried chickpeas are $49.99 for 25 lb at Walmart, or $2 a pound. Soaked overnight and ground raw with onion, parsley, cilantro, and spices, a pound makes 40 to 50 balls the size of a bought one, about 10 cents each including the frying oil. Canned chickpeas do not work: they are already cooked, and the balls fall apart in the oil. The hummus works the same way. Twenty-two cents an ounce is the price of premade hummus in foodservice tubs, while house hummus made from dried chickpeas and tahini (a 40 lb pail of tahini is $134.99 at WebstaurantStore, $3.37 a pound) comes to about 10 cents an ounce. At 10 cents a ball and 10 cents an ounce of hummus, the wrap drops from $2.88 to $1.84, a 16.7% food cost.
What the house version costs instead is time and planning. Dried chickpeas soak 12 to 24 hours, so tomorrow's falafel has to be started today, and a truck that sells out at 2 p.m. cannot make more that afternoon. The raw mix keeps in the fridge for a day or two, so leftover mix becomes the next day's first batch, not waste. Fried balls are different: held in a hot well, they dry out and harden, so they have to be fried in small batches throughout service, which takes a fryer on the truck. A cart without a fryer is better off with frozen balls that bake straight from the freezer. The ingredient saving is $1.04 a wrap, $83.20 on 80 wraps a day, and the extra prep labor has to cost less than that to pay off.