BaketlyCosting and pricing for micro bakeries
What a bake really costs, what it should sell for, and whether the market day paid. Written for people who bake and sell their own work.
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How many loaves should I bake for a market?
A $5.85 loaf selling at $9.50 needs a 62% chance of selling before it is worth baking. That makes selling out most weeks correct, and baking a few extra to be safe a steady leak.
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Wholesale vs market stall: why one price does not work for both
30% off a $9.50 loaf leaves $0.80 instead of $3.65 profit, so you give away 78% of what you make. Wholesale needs its own price, built up from cost rather than marked down from the stall.
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How much does it cost to start a micro bakery?
$1,250 of kit pays back in 343 loaves if you pay yourself $12 an hour, or 148 if you don't. The kit is the small number: your own time is 82% of what each loaf costs to make.
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How do I price my baked goods?
Four steps in order: cost it with your hours in to find the floor, learn the ceiling from bakeries near you, pick between them so every product pays a similar hourly rate, then review when costs move.
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What is the best app for managing a micro bakery?
No single answer, because three different problems hide behind the question: taking orders, tracking stock, and knowing what a bake costs. The tools that solve each are bad at the other two — here is how to tell which you have.
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Baketly compared: spreadsheets, calculators and bakery software
Five ways to cost and price a micro bakery, compared on what actually differs: what gets stored, whether your labour counts, whether history is kept, and who each one was built for.
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What should I charge for a sourdough loaf?
No universal answer, but two numbers bracket it: a floor you can calculate to the cent, and a ceiling your local market sets. Here is how to find both, and what each price between them actually pays you per hour.
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Spreadsheet, calculator or app: how micro bakers cost their bakes
Four ways to cost a bake, and what each is actually good at. The question that separates them is not features: it is what happens on the Tuesday a sack of flour goes up forty cents.
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How to run a micro bakery by the numbers
Five numbers decide whether a micro bakery pays, and none of them is revenue. What each item costs with your hours in it, what it pays you per hour, what a market day must take, how far costs have drifted, and which products earn their oven slot.
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Flour went up. What does that actually do to your prices?
A 5% rise in costs takes 8% off the profit on a loaf and 13% off a bun. The amplifier is your cost divided by your profit — and the thinner the margin, the harder a quiet ingredient rise lands.
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How to cost a recipe properly, once
Four steps, worked end to end on a batch of four loaves: price the pantry per gram, cost the batch, add packaging and your hours, divide by yield. The answer is $5.85 a loaf, and the method is what stops it going stale.
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Why the 4× rule underprices your sourdough
Multiply ingredients by four and you price your ingredients, not your morning. On one baker's own numbers the rule pays $7.88 an hour for a loaf and $36.00 an hour for buns — and cannot see the difference.
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Did the market day pay for itself?
Count only the booth fee and the day looks like it breaks even at 11 loaves. Count the fuel, the kit and your six hours at the table and it breaks even at 43. The difference is whether your stall is a business or a hobby with a float.
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Cottage food, micro bakery, small bakery: which one are you running?
Three terms used interchangeably that mean different things: a legal category, a business shape, and a different animal entirely. Most unhelpful bakery advice is advice written for one of the other two.