Price Comparison

Have you ever sat down on a weekend day off and price flour out by the cup?  It's fascinating work.

Let's do a math problem, shall we...

If the flour I buy comes in 5lb bags, and there are approximately 3 3/4 cups of flour per pound, and my recipe uses 1 3/4 cups of flour in every recipe, how many servings of cupcakes can I make with one 5lb bag of flour?

With some slight rounding (let's be honest, I spill flour from time to time), the answer you should have come up with is 10.  I can make 10 dozen cupcakes with one bag of flour.

To continue the math problem, if one bag of flour costs $1.39, how much do I spend per serving to add flour to a dozen cupcakes?  If you move the decimal point, you'll find I spend approximately 14 cents per dozen cupcakes on flour.

Is your head hurting yet?  Try doing this with every single ingredient in my recipes.  I might have just popped two Alieve :-)

In all reality, though, as much math crunching as I have done today, it's for a good cause...I wanted to make sure that what I'm charging customers is right on price point for where it should be.  I have been basing my pricing on local competitors, but never sat down and figured it out for myself.  Guess today's as good of day as any to whip out the ol' calculator.

My discoveries...??  My price is right on the money.  For most basic cupcakes (we're talking no thrills and frills, no gluten-free, no 20 hours of work) I charge $21/dozen.  Sometimes $20 if I'm feeling nice.  And calculating for supplies, electricity used, and time I donate, The total price for me to make 1 dozen cupcakes is $20.17.  That includes electricity to run the oven, boxes to store the cupcakes, money to pay myself, and cupcake liners.  Pretty spot on, isn't it ;-)

Calculating prices also helped me pinpoint where I can save some money too...the biggest expense in my cupcake baking is vanilla bean paste, a wonderful creation, but $8.99 for 4oz. of the stuff.  I've been dumping a tablespoon of it into my cupcakes, resulting in me spending $1.12 per dozen cupcakes just for vanilla flavoring.  Hmmmm....maybe this needs reworked.  So I'm going to play around with quantities a little, maybe swapping some of the paste out for vanilla extract.  I like the paste because it does provide us with actual vanilla beans, but as far as flavoring goes, vanilla extract does the job just as well.  So we'll play around with some volume, and hopefully get the cost down even more.

Number crunching is over for the day...pumpkin pies are in the oven as we speak, just waiting to be consumed by the holidays this week.  I cannot wait to eat them and share in Thanksgiving with friends and family this week.

If you're traveling this holiday week/weekend, be safe.  And to all I wish a happy and healthy Thanksgiving holiday.  I am thankful for all the support, advice, and help you have offered to me in this past year!

Lis