19 Aug 20266 min read

Retail vs wholesale vs catering pricing: why one price doesn't work for everyone

Why the same recipe needs three prices, and how to set retail, wholesale and catering prices from your costs, with a worked example.

The same cookie can sell three ways: one to a customer at your market stall, forty a week to a café, and two hundred to a caterer for an event. Each sale has different costs and a different customer, so each needs its own price.

Start every price from cost

Work out the ingredient and packaging cost per cookie first (see how to cost a recipe). Then build each price from that cost. If you build wholesale as a discount off retail, a thin retail price becomes a loss-making wholesale one.

Retail

Retail is selling direct: market stalls, your shop, online orders. It carries the most of your time per item (serving, payment fees, stall fees, packaging each one), so it has the highest multiple. Many small bakers and food makers use around 3 to 4 times ingredient cost.

Wholesale

Wholesale is selling to a business that sells on. Orders are bigger and simpler, and the café needs room to add its own margin, so the multiple is lower, often 2 to 2.5 times ingredient cost. Set a floor you won't go below, and turn down orders that need you to. More in pricing for wholesale.

Catering

Catering orders are large but often come with extras: delivery, setting up, platters, individual wrapping, sometimes staff on site. Price the food from cost, then add those extras as separate charges or build them into a multiple of around 3 times cost.

A worked example

A cookie costs 30p in ingredients and packaging.

Retail at 4 times cost: £1.20, rounded to £1.25 on the stall.
Wholesale at 2.5 times cost: 75p. The café sells it at £2.00.
Catering at 3 times cost: 90p each, plus a delivery charge.

Remember your time

These multiples cover ingredients, with your time and overheads folded in roughly. If a product takes a lot of hands-on work, like decorated biscuits, it needs a higher multiple or a separate charge for your time. See how much a micro-bakery should charge.

Keep them in step

When an ingredient goes up, all three prices need checking, and wholesale first, because its margin is thinnest. MakrPrep keeps a price list for each type of customer, suggests a minimum for each from your current costs, and warns you when a price falls below it.