09/11/2026
Look y'all I just seen walking for $5 five different flavors
Charlotte, North Carolina based artist DaBaby has put a $45 waffle on the menu of his new restaurant.
Let’s do the math.
Not whether it’s good. Not whether people will pay for it. Just what is actually sitting on the plate and what those ingredients cost.
Start with the waffle. Cornmeal and flour are two of the cheapest ingredients in a commercial kitchen. Add an egg, some milk, butter, sugar and seasoning and even being generous, you’re probably somewhere around $1 to $1.50.
Next come the collard greens. Greens themselves aren’t particularly expensive, especially purchased in restaurant quantities. Add onion, seasoning and cooking fat and a serving probably lands around $1 to $1.50.
Candied yams are much the same story. Sweet potatoes, brown sugar, butter and spices. Call it another $1 to $1.50.
Macaroni and cheese is where the cost starts climbing a little. Pasta is cheap. Cheese isn’t. Depending on what cheeses are being used and how generous the serving is, figure roughly $1.50 to $2.50.
Throw in butter, syrup, oil, seasonings and a little allowance for waste and we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.50 to $8 in food cost.
Now this is where restaurant economics matter.
A restaurant cannot sell an $8 plate for $8. You have labor. Rent. Electricity. Insurance. Equipment. Credit card fees. Somebody has to wash the dishes. Somebody has to keep the lights on.
A common restaurant food cost target is somewhere around 30 percent. So if we take the high end of our estimate, $8, and divide it by .30, we get about $26.67.
And that is using the generous end of nearly every estimate.
At $45, an $8 ingredient cost represents less than 18 percent of the selling price. If the actual food cost is closer to $6, it drops to about 13 percent.
There’s something else worth noticing.
There’s no meat here.
No chicken breast. No pork chop. No short ribs. No shrimp. Nothing that normally becomes the expensive center of a soul food plate. The costliest thing on this plate may very well be the cheese.
At a neighborhood mom and pop soul food restaurant, something like this would probably make sense somewhere around $15 to $20, depending on portion size, overhead and where the restaurant is located.
Here, it’s $45.
So economically, the unusual ingredient isn’t the collards, the yams or even the cheese.
It’s the name attached to the waffle.
