How much to charge for jam and chutney (per jar, wholesale and Christmas hampers)

Most advice on pricing homemade jam is years out of date. You'll still find forum threads saying £1.50 a jar. Jars, sugar, fruit and energy have all gone up since then, and so has the price people happily pay for something handmade at a market or farm shop.

You can't price from what other stalls charge. You need to know what one jar costs you to make, then decide what you need to earn on it.

Step 1: work out what one jar costs you

Cost the whole batch, then divide by the number of jars you actually fill (not the number you hoped for). Here's an example for a batch of 40 jars of chutney in 227g (8oz) jars. Swap in your own figures.

Two things people leave out: their own time and the jar. Together they're more than half the cost here. If you only count the fruit and sugar, you'll think a jar costs 80p and price it far too low. (For the full method, see how to cost a recipe, or put your numbers into the free recipe cost calculator.)

Step 2: set your market price

Handmade jams and chutneys at UK markets and farm shops typically sell for somewhere around £3.50 to £6.50 a jar, with the higher end for unusual flavours, small jars of something special, or a strong brand. That range is useful as a sense check, not a rule.

At £6 a jar, the example above makes £3.15 a jar, a margin of about 52%. At £4, it makes £1.15. Sell 40 jars and that's the difference between £126 and £46 for the batch, for the same work.

When I ran my bakery, the thing that helped most was deciding who I was selling to. People hunting for the cheapest jar were never going to be my customers, so I stopped pricing for them. The same goes for preserves: you're not competing with a supermarket jar of jam, so don't price like one.

Step 3: check wholesale before you say yes

Farm shops and delis usually expect to keep around half of the shelf price. If a shop sells your chutney at £6, they'll want to buy it from you at about £3.

With a cost of £2.85, that leaves you 15p a jar. That's before you drive it there. It looks like a big order, but it's mostly work for nothing.

Wholesale only makes sense for jars if one of these is true:

• Your cost per jar is low enough that half the shelf price still leaves a proper profit.
• The shop can sell at a higher shelf price, say £7.50, so your £3.75 still works.
• The order is big enough to make bigger batches, which brings your time per jar down.

More on this in pricing for wholesale.

Step 4: price a Christmas hamper

Hampers are a good way to sell three or four jars at once in November and December. The common mistake is pricing the hamper as the jars plus a bit, and forgetting the box, the filling and the time it takes to pack.

Here's an example hamper:

The packaging and packing alone cost over £5. Price this hamper at £22.50 and you've made less than if you'd sold the jars on their own. At £32, you make about £15 on it and the customer gets something that looks like a gift without any effort on their part.

Set a last order date for hampers and stick to it. Pre-orders let you buy the right number of boxes and plan your jam-making around real orders (see Christmas production planning).

Labels

Jars you sell need a full label, with ingredients, allergens and more. See how to write an ingredients list for the basics. For rules specific to jams and preserves, check with your local trading standards team.

Doing it in MakrPrep

Add your jars, lids and labels as packaging alongside your ingredients, and MakrPrep works out the cost per jar for every recipe. Set up Retail and Wholesale price lists and you can see the margin on each one side by side. A hamper can be its own recipe made from your jars, so its cost goes up by itself when your jar costs do.