How to cost a recipe properly (without a spreadsheet meltdown)
The maths behind a true cost per portion, why most bakers get it wrong, and a five-minute method you can use today.
Most small food businesses price the way they shop: roughly. A bag of flour is around a fiver, an egg is about twenty pence, so a loaf is probably… a pound? That "probably" is where the money leaks out.
Start with the pack, not the recipe
A true cost per portion begins with the pack price and pack size of every ingredient, not with a recipe. If you buy flour in 16kg sacks for £22.40, your working number is £1.40 per kilo, not "about fifteen quid a bag."
Then scale to the recipe
- Weigh every ingredient in the same unit as your pack (grams to grams, ml to ml).
- Multiply pack cost by the fraction of the pack you actually used.
- Add them up. That's your batch cost.
- Divide by the number of portions the batch actually yields, not the number you hope it yields.
The bit everyone forgets
Supplier prices move. A cost you calculated in January is fiction by June. Either you re-cost every recipe on a schedule, or your tool does it for you every time a pack price changes. There is no third option that ends well.
Once your recipe costs are honest, pricing gets easy. For more on that, see pricing for wholesale without giving margin away.