What should you charge for your homemade food?
Enter your ingredient costs, time, and packaging to get a recommended price that actually pays you — with a healthy margin built in.
Pricing Your Products the Right Way
Why vendors underprice
Most home food sellers set prices by gut feel or by copying competitors. The result: they forget to count their time, miss hidden costs like packaging and utilities, and end up making less than minimum wage. Pricing from your actual costs first — then adding margin — is the only way to build a sustainable business.
The real cost formula
Your price needs to cover four things: materials (ingredients), labor (your time × your hourly rate), packaging, and overhead (utilities, fees, equipment). Most vendors only think about ingredients. The full formula: Recommended Price = (Materials + Labor + Packaging + Overhead) ÷ 0.60. That 0.60 builds in your 40% margin.
Healthy margins
A 35–50% gross margin is standard for food businesses. It leaves room for slow weeks, re-investment, and unexpected costs. At 40% margin, every $10 you sell nets $4 toward your business. At 10% margin, a bad market day can wipe out a week of profit. Healthy margins are what let you grow instead of just survive.
Factoring in your time
Your hourly rate is the input most vendors skip. If you spend 45 minutes making sourdough and value your time at $20/hr, that's $15 in labor — before you buy a single ingredient. Counting your time at a fair rate is how you avoid the trap of working hard for nothing. Use the rate you'd actually accept to do another job.