How the calculation works
Each ingredient is costed from the pack you actually buy. If a 1 kg bag of flour costs £2.00 and the recipe uses 500 g, the flour in this batch costs £2.00 × 500 ÷ 1,000 = £1.00. Grams and kilograms convert automatically, as do millilitres and litres.
- Ingredient cost = pack price × quantity used ÷ pack size
- Labour = minutes ÷ 60 × hourly rate
- Total batch cost = ingredients + labour + packaging
- Cost per unit = total batch cost ÷ number of items the batch makes
Worked example: a batch of 12 shortbread
| Item | Pack | Used | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain flour | £2.00 / 1,000 g | 500 g | £1.00 |
| Butter | £2.00 / 250 g | 100 g | £0.80 |
| Caster sugar | £1.50 / 1,000 g | 200 g | £0.30 |
| Labour: 30 minutes at £12/hour | £6.00 | ||
| Packaging for the batch | £1.20 | ||
| Total batch cost | £9.30 | ||
| Cost per item (÷ 12) | £0.775 | ||
Notice that labour is by far the biggest cost here. It's common for home bakers to leave their own time out, which makes a product look far more profitable than it is.
Margin and markup are not the same
Both turn a cost into a price, but they measure profit against different things, so the same percentage gives different prices. The calculator makes you choose one and labels the result.
- Gross margin is profit as a share of the selling price. Price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). At a 50% margin, the £0.775 shortbread sells for £1.55, and half of that price is profit. A margin can never reach 100%.
- Markup is profit as a share of the cost. Price = cost × (1 + markup). At a 50% markup, the same shortbread sells for £1.1625, which you would probably round to £1.16 or £1.20.
What this calculator does not include
- Tax. All costs and prices exclude VAT or sales tax.
- Overheads and waste. Rent, electricity, equipment, failed bakes and unsold stock are not added automatically. A healthy-looking margin is not the same as business profit. You can account for them through your hourly rate, packaging cost or a higher margin.
- Weight-to-volume conversion. We don't assume 1 ml weighs 1 g, and we don't convert cups. Enter each ingredient in the same kind of unit you buy it in.
- Currency conversion. Pick pounds or dollars for the whole recipe.
Displayed amounts are rounded to the nearest penny or cent. The calculation itself keeps full precision, so totals are never built from rounded numbers.
Pricing more than one recipe?
A one-off calculation goes out of date as soon as butter goes up. With a saved costing workspace, you keep one ingredient list, change a price once, and see every recipe that uses it with its old and new cost.