Yield is how much sellable product you actually get out of a batch — not the theoretical maximum, but the real count after trim, spillage, broken pieces, and rejects. A recipe that "makes 24" but reliably yields 21 good units has a yield you need to know, because your true per-unit cost is the batch cost divided by the units that can actually be sold.
Costing on theoretical yield is a quiet way to underprice. If you divide ingredient cost by 24 when you only sell 21, every unit carries less cost than it really did, and the missing few are absorbed silently out of your margin. Using actual yield keeps recipe costs and COGS honest.
Yield also signals process health: a yield that drops over time points to a technique, equipment, or material problem worth chasing, and improving yield is often the cheapest way to cut per-unit cost without touching ingredients or price.
Related terms
Recipe
A defined set of ingredients, quantities, steps, and equipment needed to produce a finished good. Recipes automatically calculate production costs based on current ingredient prices.
Production Run
A recorded instance of producing goods using a recipe. Deducts ingredients from inventory, adds finished goods to stock, and tracks batch/lot numbers for traceability.
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
The total cost of materials, labor, and overhead directly tied to producing the goods you sell. Tracked automatically through purchases, recipes, and production runs.
Shrinkage
Inventory lost to causes other than sales — spoilage, breakage, theft, miscounts, and waste — measured as the gap between recorded and actual stock.
Biological Efficiency
A yield measure used by mushroom growers — the weight of fresh mushrooms harvested as a percentage of the dry weight of the substrate they grew on.