How Much Food per Person: The Portion Guide

The key amounts at a glance

The question comes up both in the shop and at the stove: how much do I actually need per person? Plan too little and you are passing round extra bread. Plan too much and you are throwing things out at the end of the week. Here are the numbers that get you right in both directions.

• Pasta: 100–125 g per adult, 60–80 g per child. For pasta as the whole main course with little on the side, go for 125 g.
• Rice: 60–80 g per adult, 40–50 g per child. It looks like nothing dry and triples once cooked.
• Potatoes: 200–250 g per adult, 120–150 g per child. For mash, count on 250 g.
• Meat, boneless: 150–180 g per adult, 80–100 g per child.
• Meat on the bone: 200–250 g per adult — the bone is on the scales, but not on the plate.
• Vegetables as a side: 200–250 g per adult, 100–150 g per child. As a main course, 300–400 g.
• Soup: 3–4 dl as a main, 2 dl as a starter.

The children's column applies roughly from school age. Toddlers need considerably less, while growing teenagers often eat as much as adults or more — for teenagers, simply plan the adult amount.

Printable portion table as a PDF

You need these numbers exactly when your phone does not appreciate sticky fingers: while cooking and while writing the shopping list. So here is the whole table on one A4 page to put up — sides, main component and vegetables, each for adults and children.

Ready to print

Portion table per person as a PDF

Every guideline amount for pasta, rice, potatoes, meat, fish, cheese and vegetables on a single page — for adults and children, weighed raw. Made for the inside of a kitchen cupboard door.

PDF · A4 · 1 page · free

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Pasta, rice and potatoes: the sides

Sides are where the guessing goes wrong most often, because raw and cooked are so far apart. Pasta per person is the classic case: 100 g dry looks like very little, but comes out at a good 250 g cooked. For a bake or a dish with plenty of sauce, 100 g is enough; for pasta as the sole main course, count on 125 g.

Rice is the biggest trap: 60–80 g per person sounds like nothing, but it triples during cooking. Measure out a full cup per person and you will have rice for two days. That is no disaster as long as it is planned for — yesterday's cold rice becomes today's fried rice.

With potatoes it depends on what you are making. For boiled potatoes 200 g is plenty; for mash count on 250 g, because some of it is lost in the peeling. The same goes for rosti: the peeling waste is already accounted for if you start from raw, unpeeled potatoes.

Meat, fish and cheese: the main component

With meat, the question that matters is whether the bone is on the scales. Boneless — strips, chicken breast, escalopes — count on 150–180 g per adult. On the bone, so legs or chops, you need 200–250 g, because a noticeable share of that weight never reaches the plate.

Minced meat is the exception in the other direction: for a bolognese or mince with pasta, 120 g per person is comfortably enough, because the sauce and the side do the rest of the work. For meatballs, where the meat is the star, use the same figure as other boneless meat.

For raclette and fondue, most people plan too tight. For raclette, count 200–250 g of cheese per adult; for fondue, 200 g plus around 1 dl of wine per 200 g of cheese. With raclette it is worth planning a little extra — leftover cheese keeps in the fridge for a week without any trouble. The full list is in our post on the raclette shopping list.

Vegetables and salad: where nearly everyone under-plans

Vegetables per person get systematically underestimated. As a side you need 200–250 g raw per adult — considerably more than most people put in the pan. A single carrot per person is not a vegetable side, it is a garnish.

When the vegetables are the main event — a vegetable curry, a bake, a stir-fry with rice — the amount nearly doubles: 300–400 g per adult. That sounds like a lot, but vegetables lose a great deal of volume as they cook. 400 g of raw courgette and pepper is an ordinary plateful.

Leafy salad, by contrast, needs only 40–60 g per person, about one good handful. A whole lettuce makes three to four portions. Salad is also the item that gets thrown away most — better to buy sparingly and more often. There is more on this in our post about food waste in Switzerland.

Turning this into a shopping list

The amounts per person are half the sum. The other half is the multiplication: four people, three pasta meals in the week, makes 1.2 to 1.5 kg of pasta. On top of that, the same onion turns up in three recipes and still only needs buying once.

By hand, you work that out with the menu plan next to the portion table and write the result onto the shopping list. It takes about fifteen minutes and it works reliably.

Either way: once the amounts are right, the extra bread at the end of the table disappears, and so does the half-used bag of carrots that turns up in the bin a fortnight later.