How would I calculate the cost of baking cookies?
By donna from Orlando, FL
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You have to know how many cups are in the bags of flour, sugar, etc. that you use. Then you need to know the cost of those bags, then take the number of dozens of cookies the recipe makes into the total cost of the ingredients. I did that many years ago, when I was married, to compare the cost of homemade cookies, with the cost of bakery cookies. There might be an easier way to do it, but this is the only way I could figure out. I only used the cost of the larger ingredients. Seasonings, etc, you don't use that much of in a recipe.
Doing the math on ingredients is the simple part. Donna said "baking" cookies so I'm thinking she might mean the actual cost of the baking process in her oven. I would be interested in knowing that as well. Is it worth trying to figure that into the cost?
1st you need to calculate the cost of raw product by ounce. There are good sources online for measurements such as how many ounces in a pound ect. Keep your list! You must also use an accurate scoop to measure cookie dough, as in 1 ounce scoop per cookie, how many cookie's per baking pan. So make a small normal batch see what your yield is. So when you know what 1 batch will yield, you take the total cost of raw product divided by the number of cookies you made, that yields the cost of 1 cookie.
Finding the cost of ingredients in a baked goods recipe is always a challenge, because your results can be wildly inaccurate if you are simply counting the cups of a given ingredient used in the recipe.
The reason is that there are several conversions that need to occur during the ingredient factoring process so that an accurate ingredient cost assessment to be made, and those important conversions are bypassed when the baker is only counting units of measure.
A better method to determine the cost of ingredients in a baked goods recipe is often to: a) determine the weight of each ingredient, then; b) find the weight and cost of the ingredient when purchased, then; c) factor the in-recipe ingredient cost based on those figures.
A recipe-cost calculator - especially one specifically designed for baked goods - is one way to make the challenge of pricing a baked goods recipe much easier.
A well-designed calculator will be programmed to automatically perform the complex math involved with obtaining a true and accurate cost of each ingredient in the recipe, and will accomplish the task quickly, with a minimum of input.
One example of an online recipe-cost calculator for baked goods can be found in the reference links below.
Reference:
www.pricingbakedgoods.com
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