What is Ingredient Yield Percentage?

Imagine you're making your famous chocolate fudge cake. You buy a 10kg bag of good-quality cocoa powder for $40.00. This bag costs you $4.00 per kilogram. When you measure out the 250g needed for your cake recipe, you're using $1.00 worth of cocoa powder. This seems straightforward, but what if some of that cocoa powder clumps together and you can't use it, or if you spill a bit while scooping? Let's say you're prepping bananas for a batch of banana bread. You buy 5kg of bananas for $7.50, which is $1.50 per kilogram. You peel and mash them, and you find that 15% of the total weight was peel and stem that you discarded. Out of your 5kg purchase, you only have 4.25kg of usable mashed banana. That means the cost of your usable banana is actually higher than $1.50 per kilogram. This concept is critical for ingredients where there's a significant difference between what you buy and what you can actually use in your bakes. Think about peeling and coring apples for a pie, trimming fat from a cut of meat if you make savory pastries, or even the slight loss of flour when sifting. For every 100g of apples you buy, if you trim away 20g, you only have 80g left to put in your pie. The cost of those 80g is what matters for your recipe costing.