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

The same cookie sells three different ways: a customer buys one at your market stall, a café buys forty a week for their counter, and a caterer orders two hundred for an event. Charging the same price to all three would be a mistake, and calculating prices every time is inefficient.

Start from cost, not from retail

Every price, retail included, should start from your true cost per unit, the flour, the butter, the packaging. That's ingredient cost, not time or labour, those are real costs too, but they're not something a costing tool tracks for you automatically. More on that below. Retail isn't a special reference point, it's just the first tier you calculate once you know what that cookie actually costs to make in ingredients. Skip that step and you're not pricing, you're guessing with extra confidence.

Wholesale needs a floor, not a discount

The instinct is to knock a flat percentage off your retail price for wholesale customers, forty cookies at a discount off the market-stall price. That's backwards, and it's backwards for the same reason retail-first pricing is backwards: it treats retail as the truth and wholesale as a discount off it, when both should be built from cost. Decide the minimum margin you'll accept on volume, and set the wholesale price from your true cost, not from retail. If a wholesale order ever dips below that floor, the answer isn't to accept it anyway, it's to say no.

Catering still needs its own honest cost

Catering usually comes with its own costs on top of ingredients, delivery, setup, sometimes extra time on-site, so treat it as its own tier with its own margin, not a scaled-up version of wholesale or a discount off retail. One thing to be clear on: cost-per-portion tools like this track ingredient cost, not labour or time automatically. If a catering job takes you twice as long as a normal batch, that needs to be built into the margin you choose for that tier, the tool won't add it for you.

The same recipe, three honest prices

One cookie recipe, three prices, each one built from the same true ingredient cost, not from each other. This only works if that cost can hold three separate tiers without you recalculating from scratch every time a supplier price shifts. Whichever way you're tracking costs, whether that's a spreadsheet or something built for it, that's the one thing that has to hold up.