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Food costing for home kitchens that sell

Meal prep boxes, tiffins, festival sweets, pickles, chutneys or frozen dumplings: if you sell food you make at home, you need to know what each box or jar costs before you set its price.

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Why home businesses under-price

When you cook at home, ingredients come out of the household shopping and it is easy to guess low. A tiffin that seems to cost “about the price of the vegetables” also uses oil, spices, rice, gas and a container, and those small amounts are where the money goes.

Cost a meal box in four steps

  1. Enter what you buy: the 5 L can of oil, the 1 kg bag of dal, the 100 g box of turmeric, with what you paid.
  2. Write the recipe for a full batch with the amounts you use.
  3. Add the extras: containers, bags, labels and cooking gas for the batch.
  4. Set how many boxes it makes. The cost per box appears.

Then compare it with your price using the food cost percentage calculator, or find a price from your cost with the recipe price calculator.

Pickles, chutneys and things sold by weight

For anything sold by the jar or by the kilo, weigh what one batch yields once it is finished. Cooking loses water, so the yield is often well under the weight that went in. Enter that finished weight with the recipe and Recipe Cost Calculator shows the cost per kilogram, which you can scale to any jar size.