How to cost sourdough bread (including the starter)

Sourdough looks cheap on paper: flour, water, salt. That's exactly why it's so often underpriced. The ingredients are cheap, but the time isn't, and the starter, the blend of flours and the weight you lose in the oven all change the real cost.

Cost by dough weight, not by loaf

The simplest way is to cost a whole batch of dough, then divide by the number of loaves you scale it into. Here's a batch for ten 900 g loaves of dough (about 800 g baked):

• Strong white flour, 4.2 kg at £1.30/kg: £5.46
• Wholemeal flour, 0.8 kg at £1.60/kg: £1.28
• Water, 3.6 litres: about 1p
• Salt, 100 g at £1.00/kg: £0.10
• Starter, 1 kg (half flour, half water): £0.65

That's about £7.50 for 9.7 kg of dough. Scaled at 900 g, it makes ten loaves with a little spare, so ingredients are about 75p a loaf.

Don't forget the starter

Your starter is made of flour, and you feed it every day whether you bake or not. Cost the flour in the starter you use (as above), and if you discard a lot, add the cost of a week's feeding spread across a week's loaves. It's usually a few pence a loaf, but it's real.

Add packaging and waste

• Paper bag and label: about 12p.
• If one loaf in twenty doesn't make it (bad shape, burnt, unsold), add 5%.

Cost per loaf: about 75p plus 12p, plus 5%: roughly 91p.

Now price the time

Sourdough's cost is mostly time. Mixing, folds, shaping, baking and cleaning for ten loaves can easily be two hours of hands-on work, spread over two days. At £15 an hour, that's £3 a loaf. Bigger batches bring this down a lot: the same two hours might do thirty loaves if your oven allows.

So for ten loaves: 91p ingredients and packaging, £3 time, plus overheads and profit. A price under £4.50 is unlikely to be paying you properly at that batch size. For the full method, see how much a micro-bakery should charge.

Recost when flour moves

Flour is most of your ingredient cost, so a 10% rise in flour is close to a 10% rise in ingredients. It's still small next to your time, but it adds up across hundreds of loaves.

In MakrPrep, set your starter up as a component (half flour, half water), use it in each bread recipe, and every loaf's cost updates when you change a flour price. Or cost one loaf now with our free recipe cost calculator.