Yield Percentage Calculator
Pick an ingredient and say which direction you need. The calculator converts between as-purchased weight and trimmed, edible weight, shows how much you throw away, and works out what the usable portion really costs per pound.
The Two Formulas Behind It
Everything on this page comes from one relationship between what you buy and what you can actually cook with. Kitchens call the first figure the as-purchased quantity (APQ) and the second the edible portion quantity (EPQ).
Going forward, from the shopping bag to the cutting board: EPQ = APQ × yield%. Going backwards, from the recipe to the shopping list: APQ = EPQ ÷ yield%. The second one is the one people get wrong, because the instinct is to add a percentage rather than divide by one. A recipe needing 2 pounds of peeled butternut squash at 66% yield does not need 2 pounds plus 34% — it needs 2 ÷ 0.66, which is 3.03 pounds, and that is a whole extra pound of squash.
Yield Percentages by Ingredient
These are the figures the calculator uses. Vegetable yields follow the Chefs Resources average produce yield table; fruit yields follow the US Foods produce yield table. Both assume standard restaurant prep — peeled, cored, stemmed, seeded where that applies.
| Ingredient | Yield | What the loss is |
|---|---|---|
| Lemons, for juice | 36% | Peel, pith, pulp, seeds |
| Pineapple | 38% | Skin, crown, core |
| Peas, green in the pod | 38% | Pods |
| Cantaloupe | 43% | Rind and seed cavity |
| Oranges, segmented | 44% | Peel, pith, membrane |
| Watermelon | 52% | Rind |
| Cauliflower, whole | 55% | Leaves and core |
| Asparagus | 56% | Woody ends |
| Broccoli, whole heads | 61% | Thick stalk and leaves |
| Peppers, bell | 65% | Stem, core, seeds, ribs |
| Squash, butternut or acorn | 66% | Skin, seeds, stem |
| Banana | 66% | Peel |
| Avocado | 72% | Skin and stone |
| Spinach, untrimmed | 74% | Stems and damaged leaves |
| Celery | 75% | Base, leaves, tough outer ribs |
| Peaches | 76% | Skin and stone |
| Pears | 78% | Skin and core |
| Sweet potato | 80% | Skin and ends |
| Potato, russet or Yukon Gold | 81% | Skin and eyes |
| Onion, jumbo | 89% | Papery skin, root, top |
| Tomatoes, round | 91% | Core and stem scar |
| Strawberries, hulled | 94% | Green tops |
| Zucchini or yellow squash | 95% | Ends only |
| Mushrooms, button | 97% | Stem bases |
The full list in the dropdown runs to 51 entries. Anything not listed can be entered by hand with the custom option.
Related Tools & Guides
Trim Loss and Cooking Loss Are Two Different Losses
This is the part almost every chart skips. Yield percentage stops at the cutting board. It tells you how much usable raw ingredient you have once the peel, seeds and woody ends are in the bin. It says nothing about what happens once heat is involved.
Spinach is the clearest case. Buy a pound of untrimmed spinach and roughly 74% of it survives stemming, so you have about 12 ounces of leaves. Then you wilt it, and those 12 ounces collapse to something closer to 3. Two separate losses, applied one after the other, and a recipe that asks for "1 cup cooked spinach" has quietly asked you to buy far more than a cup of anything.
The order matters: apply yield percentage first to get from as-purchased to trimmed, then apply cooking shrinkage to get from trimmed to cooked. The raw to cooked weight converter handles the second half for meat, grains and vegetables.
What the Ingredient Really Costs
Enter a shelf price and the calculator divides it by the yield. That single division is why recipe costing done from shelf prices always comes out too low.
Pineapple at $2.00 a pound looks cheaper than strawberries at $4.00 a pound. After yield, the pineapple costs $5.26 per usable pound and the strawberries cost $4.26. The comparison flips. Anyone pricing a menu, or just deciding between whole and pre-cut produce at the store, is comparing the wrong two numbers until yield is in the calculation. The cost per serving calculator takes it the rest of the way to a per-portion figure.
Treat Any Chart as a Starting Number
Published yield tables disagree with each other, and the disagreement is not a mistake. Strawberries appear at 94% in the US Foods table and 87% in a culinary mathematics textbook. Both are right for the kitchen that measured them: the gap is how much green shoulder gets cut away with the hull.
Yield moves with grade, size, season and the person holding the knife. Large onions yield better than small ones because the papery skin is a smaller share of the whole. Late-season celery has more to strip off. If an ingredient matters to your costs, run one yield test — weigh it whole, prep it as you normally would, weigh the usable part, divide — and use your own figure from then on. The charts are for the ingredients you buy once.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is yield percentage in cooking?
It is the share of what you bought that survives trimming, peeling, coring and boning — edible portion quantity divided by as-purchased quantity, times 100. A butternut squash at 66% yield gives 1.32 pounds of usable flesh from a 2 pound squash, with the other 0.68 pound going to skin, seeds and stem.
How do I calculate how much produce to buy?
Divide the trimmed weight your recipe needs by the yield expressed as a decimal, then round up to whole units you can actually buy. Two pounds of peeled butternut needs 2 ÷ 0.66 = 3.03 pounds of whole squash, which in practice means one large squash or two small ones.
Is yield percentage the same as cooking shrinkage?
No, and the two stack. Yield covers loss before cooking; shrinkage covers moisture and fat lost during cooking. Apply yield first to reach trimmed weight, then shrinkage to reach cooked weight.
Why do published yield percentage charts disagree?
Because yield depends on grade, size, season and how hard the cook trims. Treat any published figure as a starting point and replace it with your own once you have weighed a real batch.
How does yield percentage change the cost of an ingredient?
Divide the shelf price by the yield to get the true cost per usable pound. Pineapple at $2.00 a pound with a 38% yield actually costs $5.26 for every pound of fruit that reaches the plate.