Butchery yield: what your meat really costs per kilo
A butchery buys meat by the carcass and sells it by the cut. The difference between the two is bone, fat, trim and the weight that simply disappears in the cold room and on the block. That difference is the yield, and it decides whether the prices on your board make money.
What yield is
Yield is the share of the carcass you end up selling as meat. If a 250 kg carcass gives you 190 kg of cuts and mince, the yield is 190 ÷ 250 = 76%. The other 24% is bone you sell cheaply, fat and trim, and loss.
A worked example
These numbers are made up to show the sum; use your own.
- You buy a 250 kg carcass at US$4.20 a kilo: US$1,050.
- Cutting gives 190 kg of cuts and mince, 35 kg of bones you sell for soup at US$1.00 a kilo, and 25 kg of fat, trim and loss with no value.
- The bones bring back US$35, so the cuts and mince have to recover US$1,050 − US$35 = US$1,015.
- Spread over 190 kg, that is US$1,015 ÷ 190 = US$5.34 a kilo.
Your meat costs US$5.34 a kilo, not US$4.20. Price your cuts with a markup on US$4.20 and you are selling below cost before you pay rent, wages or electricity.
From cost to prices
Cuts do not all sell at one price: fillet carries the cheaper cuts and the mince. What matters is the average. If you want 25% of the selling price as gross margin, the cuts from this carcass have to average US$5.34 ÷ 0.75 = US$7.12 a kilo. Weigh what each cut gives you, set the prices, and check the weighted average clears that line.
Why yield changes
- The animal: breed, age and grade change how much meat and bone a carcass carries.
- The cutter: two butchers on the same carcass can be several kilos apart in saleable meat.
- The cold room: meat loses a little weight as it hangs and dries.
- The supplier: a cheaper carcass with a worse yield can cost more per kilo sold.
Measure it every time
Weigh every carcass in and every cut out, per carcass. After a few weeks you will know your real yield per supplier and per butcher, and you can price from facts instead of habit. Scale barcodes on pre-packed trays keep the weight sold accurate at the till.
With Syncro POS
Syncro POS receives a carcass and breaks it into cuts, keeps stock by the kilo, sells by weight or by price, reads the weight from a connected scale and scans scale barcodes, so the yield you see comes from what you actually cut and sold.