How Much Ground Beef per Person to Buy for Your Next Gathering (2024)

• How to Cook

When hosting a gathering or making a recipe for a potluck, there's often a lot of confusion concerning how much food you should make. Should you double a recipe? Triple it? What if you don't know how many people will be there? It gets overwhelming pretty quickly. Quantities of party drinks and appetizers are a little easier to figure out, but what about larger recipes made with ground beef? Burgers, sloppy joes, and meatballs are go-to dishes to serve a large group, but determining exactly how much ground beef per person is necessary requires some strategic thinking and a bit of math. With these guidelines, however, figuring out how much ground beef per person you'll need for your next group gathering will be easier than ever.

Sloppy Joes

Our classic sloppy joes recipe calls for 1 pound of ground beef to make 6 sandwiches, which is 3 ounces of ground beef per sandwich. Depending on the size of your bun and how meaty you like your sandwich, you can increase or decrease that amount an ounce or two either way. Based on the 3-ounce guideline, we've done the math for how much ground beef per person you should purchase based on the size of your crowd. To be safe, round up to the nearest full pound.

• 10 sandwiches = 30 ounces = just under 2 pounds ground beef
• 15 sandwiches = 45 ounces = 2¾ pounds ground beef
• 20 sandwiches = 60 ounces = 3¾ pounds ground beef
• 25 sandwiches = 75 ounces = 4⅔ pounds ground beef

Burgers

Our Test Kitchen uses a range of 1 to 1½ pounds of ground beef to make 4 burgers, which is 4 to 6 ounces of ground beef per burger. Use these guidelines to calculate how much ground beef per person to buy for your occasion, and check out our best tips for grilling burgers to cook up a crowd favorite for your guests.

• 10 burgers = 40 to 60 ounces = 2½ to 3¾ pounds ground beef
• 15 burgers = 60 to 90 ounces = 3¾ to 5⅔ pounds ground beef
• 20 burgers = 80 to 120 ounces = 5 to 7½ pounds ground beef
• 25 burgers = 100 to 150 ounces = 6¼ to 9⅓ pounds ground beef

Meatballs

It's trickier to determine how much ground beef per person is needed for meatballs. There's no standard size for a meatball, and given the smaller size of the food, typically no one's going to eat just one meatball. These factors make it hard to know how many meatballs to cook per person. Most of the meatball recipes from our Test Kitchen use between ⅓ and ½ ounce ground meat (we usually use a mix of a couple of different ground meats, like beef, pork, chicken, etc.) per meatball. We've seen much larger meatballs than that, but sticking to our standard amount (and assuming you're solely using ground beef), here are the conversions.

• 30 meatballs = 10 to 15 ounces = ⅔ to about 1 pound ground beef
• 40 meatballs = 13 to 20 ounces = ⅞ to 1¼ pounds ground beef
• 50 meatballs = 16½ to 25 ounces = 1 to 1½ pounds ground beef
• 60 meatballs = 20 to 30 ounces = 1¼ to 2 pounds ground beef
• 70 meatballs = 23 to 35 ounces = 1½ to 2¼ pounds ground beef
• 80 meatballs = 26 to 40 ounces = 1⅔ to 2½ pounds ground beef

These are just general guidelines to help determine how much ground beef per person is required to feed your crowd. Make adjustments as needed, but note that the amount of ground beef needed to make sloppy joes, burgers, and meatballs varies even when the number of people remains the same. When purchasing ground beef for your next gathering, consider ordering at the counter so the butcher can wrap your exact quantities for each recipe separately, eliminating any miscalculations or confusion when you're ready to whip up your crowdpleasers in the kitchen.