Pricing Your Cookies for Sale
Congratulations! You’ve made the leap into selling your cookies professionally.
But now comes one of the trickiest parts - how to price your cookies so that your business is actually successful, while appearing affordable to potential customers?
These questions comes up all the time in local cookier groups:
Is my cookie pricing fair?
How much should I charge for these cookies?
Should I charge less for smaller cookies?
Should I charge less for less detailed cookies?
How much should you charge per cookie?
This is the most common question I see.
The answer is probably a lot more than you’d expect.
First of all, you need to make sure what you are selling your cookies for is fair and reasonable - not just for the customer, but also for you.
You are making and selling a hand-made item. You aren’t a mass-production factory.
Your time and skills are both valuable in terms of a literal dollar amount.
Time for some math
To work out what to charge, you absolutely cannot go on a gut feeling. You can’t look at a cookie and think ‘that’d be worth x amount’ - I can guarantee you will be underselling yourself by a massive amount.
To work out what your outgoing costs are, you need to do some math. You need to add up every expense you have, which will likely include some aspects you haven’t thought of. Some of these will need to be in terms of ‘per cookie’ and some will be in terms of time spent.
You need to consider your outgoing costs and then factor in what sort of profit you are comfortable with. And yes, you absolutely MUST include a profit - you aren’t a charity, and I’ll say it again - your time and expertise are both valuable in terms of a literal dollar amount. Respect that and respect yourself.
Cost inclusions
Here is a list of things to take into account for your outgoings:
Cost of ingredients (I do this as ‘per cookie’ - e.g. a box of flour makes x number of cookies on average)
Sugar cookie ingredients
Fondant or royal icing
Decorations such as dye, paint, sprinkles, etc
Cost of packaging (again, I do this as ‘per cookie’)
Business registration costs (the amount you are paying your local council per year to run your business - include a portion of this per cookie)
Equipment costs (included as a portion per cookie)
Electricity costs (included as a portion per cookie)
Business costs (e.g. advertising, website, market stalls, etc - however you run your business, you need to include the costs of these in your planning)
Your time is literally money
Next comes your time - what are you willing to pay yourself per hour? Imagine you were doing this job for an employer, what would you want to be paid per hour for your knowledge and skills? It should be AT LEAST minimum wage, which as of Dec 2024 is $24.10 per hour.
You’ll need to work out roughly how long each cookie takes to make (from dough to packaged and ready to send out the door), then divide the ‘hourly wage’ by that to work out how much to include in the cost of each cookie. This isn’t your profit by the way, this is just you paying yourself for your time and expertise.
Cookies of different sizes and complexity
Working out the time per cookie can be particularly challenging - some will be far less detailed and take far less time. You may choose to have a flexible pricing option to account for this, or average it out and just have one standard price, accepting that your ‘earning’ less for the more complex cookies and more for the simpler ones. E.g a single-colour fondant cookie with basic stamp will take far less time than one that is painted with individually placed accents and sprinkles. Note that the cost of ingredients per cookie would also be different depending how many cookies you can get out of a batch of dough. So you might like to set up 2 or 3 different versions based on your usual cookie sizes - one for minis, one for more regular size, and one for larger cookies.
Profits aren’t just nice, they’re necessary
Then you need to work out how much profit you’d like per cookie. This is ON TOP OF the ingredients, business costs, and your own wage. You won’t be profitable unless you are making a profit, and you aren’t making a profit if you’re counting your wages as your profit.
Overall
For myself, with the cost of ingredients in my area, my own particular business costs etc, it would work out at about $6.50 per medium-sized cookie.
This is far higher than the very-common $3.50 I see a lot of people willing to sell theirs for.
I must say, I did put my own wage at $40/hour, because I value my time above the minimum wage. In my 9-5 job I am worth about $70/hour, and I’m not willing to drop significantly below that just because it’s ‘not a real job’ or is ‘just a hobby’. But that’s for another post…
I’d recommend making an actual document of how you come about your pricing. That way you can refer back to it if you ever start to doubt yourself. You’ll also be able to adapt it as the cost of ingredients and packaging change over time.
I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out if you’d like more personalised help with your situation.
