Traditional sweets: costing family recipes for sale

A traditional sweet is costed by the batch. Add up everything that goes into the pan, weigh what comes out once it has set, divide by the size of the piece or portion you sell, then add the bag, the label and your time. In the example below, a batch of fudge that fills 10 bags of 200 g costs $43.65 all in: $4.37 a bag, or $4.85 if one bag in ten never gets sold.

Why the family recipe is not ready for pricing

Family recipes come in cups, spoonfuls, "a knob of butter" and "until it looks right". They work for cooking. They do not work for pricing. To cost a sweet you need three numbers the recipe card does not have:

• The weight of every ingredient. A cup of sugar and a cup of flour weigh different amounts. Weigh each one once and write the grams on the card.
• What the batch actually gives you. This is your yield. It depends on how far you cook it, your pan and how you cut it, so nobody can give it to you. You measure it.
• The size of one piece or portion. "A square" changes with whoever holds the knife.

With those three numbers, the recipe becomes a card you can cost, repeat and hand to someone else.

Step 1: cost the whole batch

List every ingredient with the price you paid and the amount you use. If you buy condensed milk by the can, the cost goes in by the can. If your recipe uses 230 g of butter from a 250 g block, the cost depends on what happens to the other 20 g: if it goes into the next batch, cost the 230 g; if it sits in the fridge until it goes off, cost the whole block. The guide on adjusting recipes to the pack sizes you buy covers when it pays to round the recipe to the pack.

Add the stove too. Work out what an hour of your hob or oven costs you and multiply by the cooking time.

Step 2: weigh what you actually get

For fudge, weigh the slab once it has set, then trim the edges and weigh again. For puddings, weigh the cooked pudding in its tray before you portion it. Do this over two or three batches and use the average. If it swings a lot, look at your cooking temperature and timing before you look at your price.

Decide now what happens to offcuts. If you bag them and sell them cheaper, they are income. If you eat them or give them away, they are waste, and they come out of the usable weight. The guide on recipe yield has the general method.

Step 3: fix the piece size and stick to it

Divide the usable weight by the piece size. A 2,000 g slab cut into 25 g pieces gives 80 pieces. To make that true at the bench, cut with a ruler or a marked tray and weigh the first few pieces. Two extra grams per piece sounds like nothing, but over 80 pieces it is 160 g, most of a 200 g bag gone.

Step 4: add packaging and your time

Bags, labels, ribbon and tins are added per unit. Your time is added per batch: the hours from weighing the sugar to sealing the last bag, including beating, waiting for it to set and cutting, multiplied by what you pay yourself per hour. Spread over the batch, that is your time per bag. For the full method with gas, rent and the rest, see the loaded cost per unit.

Worked example: a batch of vanilla fudge

You sell fudge in 200 g bags at a weekend farmers market.

Yield. Over three batches the set slab averages 2,100 g. You trim 100 g of ragged edges and eat them, so 2,000 g is usable. At 25 g a piece: 2,000 ÷ 25 = 80 pieces, which makes 10 bags of 8 pieces (200 g each).

Packaging. Bag, label and ribbon come to $0.45 a bag. For 10 bags: 10 × 0.45 = $4.50.

Your time. Two hours of cooking, beating, cutting and bagging at $15 an hour: 2 × 15 = $30.00.

Batch cost: 9.15 + 4.50 + 30.00 = $43.65.

Cost per bag: 43.65 ÷ 10 = $4.37. Per piece: 43.65 ÷ 80 = $0.55.

Now the real world. If one bag in ten ends up as tasters or goes past its best before the next market, the $43.65 is paid by the 9 bags you sell: 43.65 ÷ 9 = $4.85 per bag sold. That is your real cost.

Price. To keep half of every sale: 4.85 ÷ (1 − 0.50) = $9.70. If you sell at $8.00, your margin is (8.00 − 4.85) ÷ 8.00 = 39.4%.

Look at where the money goes: your time is $30.00 of $43.65, about 69% of the batch. The sugar and butter are the cheap part. That is why sweets priced "like grandma charged" rarely pay the person making them.

When you make a bigger batch

Doubling the recipe does not always double the yield. Fudge in a wider pan cooks and sets differently, and a bigger pot takes longer to reach temperature. Multiply the ingredients by the same factor, then weigh what comes out again and recount the pieces. The guide on scaling a recipe without breaking the cost explains what does not scale in proportion (stove time, your time), and the recipe scaler works out each ingredient for the number of portions you need.

The other classics

• Steamed and baked puddings: cost the tray, weigh the cooked pudding, then portion by weight or by a fixed cutting grid. Foil tins and lids go in per portion.
• Rice pudding and custard pots: cost the pan as above. When the pot and lid cost nearly as much as the pudding, see desserts in cups and jars.
• Toffee and brittle: breakage is part of the yield. Weigh what you can sell, not what you poured.
• Doughnuts and other fried sweets: the oil and what is left at closing matter as much as the dough. See doughnuts and fried sweets.

For the rest of your counter, the guide on how to price desserts and sweets has the full method.

Do it with the calculator

Put the batch (ingredients, stove and your time), the usable weight you measured and your piece size into the food cost calculator, and it gives you the cost per bag and the price for the margin you choose.