Calculator
What your weekly family box actually leaves you
Enter the box price and your real per pan costs to see food cost percent, the margin the box leaves and what each entree contributes.
Free tools
Calculators for a weekly freezer meal kitchen
Two working calculators for the numbers that decide whether a week of family boxes pays: the margin in the box and the pounds you pull for the cook day.
Almost every problem a small freezer meal kitchen brings to us is one of two arguments with arithmetic. The first is the price of the box, which was set two years ago on a feeling and has not been rechecked since beef and butter moved. The second is the thaw, which is guessed on Sunday and either wastes half a case or leaves you searing frozen breasts at seven in the morning.
Both calculators below run in your browser with realistic defaults for a five entree family box, so they show a sensible answer before you change anything. Put in your own numbers and they become yours. Neither one asks for an email, and both of them use the same math FreezerFive runs against your real orders on Home Kitchen, Commercial Kitchen and Multi Route.
Calculator
How much chicken to pull and how early to pull it
Work the thaw backward from orders so you open the right number of cases and start the pull early enough to stay in refrigerated thaw.
Working document
The frozen meal label and allergen audit checklist
Run this checklist across one entree before your next production day and you will find out in twenty minutes what an inspector would find in five.
Open because the thaw guess costs real chicken
Both of these numbers already get worked out by hand in this trade every week, usually in the margin of a menu rotation sheet or on the back of last week's pick list. An owner divides the case price by the portion weight, forgets the cook yield entirely, and prices a five entree family box that has been running at thirty six percent food cost since the last beef move. The same owner counts Sunday's orders, rounds up because rounding up feels safe, and pulls a case and a half of breast that either runs out at the sear station on Thursday or sits thawed in the walk in with a two day clock on it and no run for nine days.
So the calculators are open. No sign up, no email, nothing to dismiss before you can type in your own case weight, your own cooked ounces per serving and your own tray and film cost. They are worth keeping even if you never look at FreezerFive itself: the margin one gives you a box price you can defend out loud to a household that asks why it went up in October, and the thaw planner gives you a pull figure and a lead time you can tape to the freezer door on Monday morning. The only thing the paid product adds is that it reads the orders that closed on Tuesday instead of asking you to count them.
Put the same math on the week's pick list
The two figures you just worked out here are the ones that go stale fastest, because case costs move and the order count is different every Tuesday night. FreezerFive keeps both current against real closed orders. Book a demo and we will load one of your entrees, one case cost and one order sheet, then print the pick list and the pull weights that come out the other end.