How to Price Baked Goods for Wholesale (and Delivery)

To price baked goods for wholesale, work out the full cost of one item (ingredients, packaging, labor and overhead), divide by one minus the margin you need, and round up. A 30% margin is a sensible floor: cost ÷ 0.70. Then cost the delivery separately, because a wholesale order that's dropped off three times a week can lose money at a perfectly good price. In the example below, a loaf of taro sweet bread costs $4.91 to make and wholesales at $7.25, and the café's order of 8 loaves three times a week loses $7.37 a week once the driving is counted, until the order is reshaped. Below are the steps, the delivery math, the terms to agree, and a free calculator.

The short version

1. Full cost per item: ingredients and packaging, labor, overhead.
2. Wholesale price = full cost ÷ (1 − your margin). At 30%, divide by 0.70. Round up.
3. The store's shelf price is wholesale ÷ 0.60 if it keeps 40%. Check it's a price people pay near you.
4. Cost one delivery: driving time at your labor rate, plus miles.
5. Divide that by your margin per item: that's how many items a delivery needs to pay for itself.
6. If the order is smaller, charge for delivery, set a minimum, deliver less often, or put the café on a route.
7. Write the terms down: days, cut-off for changes, payment, unsold bread, and when prices are reviewed.
8. TaroStack keeps the cost under the price current and the café's orders in one place. More below.

Step 1: the full cost of one loaf

Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, bakes taro sweet bread in batches of 24. A café down the road has asked for 8 loaves on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, to slice and toast. The cost of one loaf:

The batch cost is from the inventory template with recipes and the labor from how to compute labor cost in baking. If you've never worked out a full cost, how to price baked goods goes through each part slowly.

Step 2: from cost to wholesale price

At a 30% margin: $4.91 ÷ 0.70 = $7.01. Round up to $7.25, which leaves $2.34 a loaf.

If the café resold whole loaves and kept 40% of its shelf price, it would sell them at $7.25 ÷ 0.60, about $12. A café serving the bread as toast does its own math by the slice, but it's still worth knowing what a whole loaf would need to sell for, because that's the price at your own market table too. Selling it there for $7.25 would undercut the café that pays you $7.25.

Before you quote, look at what other bakeries' loaves cost on shelves near you. If a comparable loaf sells for $8, you have a product problem or a cost problem, not a pricing problem, and it's better to find out now than after a year of standing orders.

Step 3: cost the delivery

Here's where wholesale pricing goes wrong. The café is 6 miles away, and a delivery takes 40 minutes there and back, with the handover:

At $2.34 margin a loaf, a delivery needs 10 loaves to pay for its own driving. The café wants 8. So each delivery loses $2.46, and the week, three deliveries, loses $7.37 on bread that's priced correctly. Nothing about the $7.25 is wrong. The order is the wrong shape.

Step 4: reshape the order

The same 24 loaves a week, the café's way and five others:

Any of the middle four is a reasonable offer. Two deliveries of 12 is a good compromise when the bread needs to be fresh. One delivery works if it keeps or the café has a freezer. A delivery charge is honest and lets the café choose. And a route is the best of all: once you're already driving to two other cafés and a grocery on Thursdays, adding a fourth stop costs a few minutes, not forty. The one offer to avoid is the one the café asked for, at the price you first thought of.

Step 5: write the terms down

A standing order is a small contract, and the things that go wrong with it are always the things nobody agreed:

The price review clause matters most. Butter and taro won't cost the same next spring, and a price that can't move is a margin that shrinks every month. The unsold-bread line matters next: if the café can return what it didn't sell, you're not selling wholesale, you're lending bread.

Get the calculator

Download the wholesale pricing calculator. It has the full cost and wholesale price, the delivery cost and how many loaves a delivery needs, the week as the café asked for it, and the five other ways to deliver the same order. Change any number and the rest follows. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Wholesale price        =ROUNDUP(full cost / (1 - margin) * 4, 0) / 4
Cost of one delivery   =minutes / 60 * labor rate + miles * cost per mile
Loaves to pay for it   =ROUNDUP(delivery cost / (wholesale - full cost), 0)

Where this stops working

A wholesale price is set once and lives for months, and everything under it moves. The $4.91 was right in September. By February the butter is up, a new baker is slower at shaping, and the café has quietly gone from 12 loaves to 9 on Fridays, below what pays for the drive. None of that shows up in the calculator, because nobody reopens it. And with four or five wholesale customers, each with their own days, quantities and shelf-life asks, the baking plan becomes a whiteboard and a memory, which is how a Friday order gets missed.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack keeps the cost under your wholesale price current. Ingredients come in at the price you paid, freight included; each batch you record is costed from the lots it actually used, divided by the loaves that came out good; and margins are reported per product on that actual cost, so the day the sweet bread's $2.34 has shrunk to $1.90 is a day you see rather than one you find out at tax time. A price-creep report per supplier shows whose prices moved.

The café itself is a customer, with its own shelf-life rule: "at least 3 days left" is set once, and a batch made too early for it is flagged before you bake. Its orders go in as sales orders, with a picking list and a delivery note, and the lot goes on each delivery, so a recall knows which cafés got which bake. Planning turns the week's orders into what to bake and what to buy, as a draft you approve, so the Friday order is on the plan instead of on the whiteboard. TaroStack doesn't work out delivery costs; that part stays in the calculator.

Customers, sales orders, lots and delivery notes are on every plan, from $49 a month; recipes, batches, true cost and planning are on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, and your recipes, customers and open orders import from a spreadsheet. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How much should a bakery charge a café wholesale?

Enough to cover the full cost of each item and leave your margin, usually cost ÷ 0.70 for 30%, plus whatever the delivery costs if the order is too small to carry it. Then check the café could sell it at a price its customers pay.

What's the difference between wholesale and retail bakery prices?

Wholesale is what the café or store pays you; retail is what its customers pay. A store keeping 40% sells at wholesale ÷ 0.60, so a $7.25 loaf sells for about $12. Your own retail price should match the store's, not your wholesale price.

Should I charge cafés for delivery?

If a delivery's driving time and miles cost more than the margin on what's delivered, yes, or set a minimum order, or deliver less often. Work out one delivery's cost and divide by your margin per item to find the break-even order.

Do wholesale bakeries take back unsold products?

That's for the terms to say. The simplest arrangement is a sale: unsold goods are the café's, and only quality problems are replaced. Taking back unsold goods turns the arrangement into consignment, and the price should reflect that risk.