How to Price Biscotti, With a Free Calculator

To price biscotti, cost a whole batch, the flour, eggs, almonds and dipping chocolate, and divide by the pieces it slices into; add the labor of two bakes and the slicing in between, the bag, and the kitchen's share; then price for your margin after card fees: price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin − fees). Biscotti are cheap to make and slow to make, so the labor is the biggest cost. In the example below, an almond biscotti dipped in chocolate costs 93 cents to make and sells for $2.25 singly, $14 for a bag of eight, $1.25 to cafés, and $28 for a holiday tin of sixteen. Below is the batch, the labor, the prices for each channel, what moves the cost, and a free calculator.

The short version

• Cost a batch: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, nuts, flavorings and the dipping chocolate.
• Divide by the pieces you slice, not the ones you hoped for: the ends and broken pieces don't sell.
• Add the labor: mixing, shaping logs, the first bake, slicing, the second bake and dipping.
• Add the bag or wrap and a share of the kitchen's rent and power.
• Price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin − fees), rounded up.
• Biscotti keep for weeks, so bags, tins and café jars are where they sell.
• TaroStack costs every batch from what you paid, with its labor minutes. More below.

The batch

Cumberland Gap Biscotti Co., a made-up biscotti baker in Middlesboro, Kentucky, I use in these examples, bakes almond biscotti dipped in dark chocolate, two logs of 24:

That's 24 cents a piece. The almonds and chocolate are more than half of it; plain anise biscotti cost less than half as much. If a batch slices into 44 good pieces, with the heels and a few that crumbled set aside, each costs about 26 cents; how to track that is in batch yield formula.

The labor and the kitchen

Biscotti take time in steps: shape the logs, bake, cool, slice on the diagonal, lay out the slices, bake again, cool, dip, set. The ovens do most of the waiting, but the hands-on minutes still come to 75 for a batch of 48, nearly twice the ingredients. Baking four batches at once, with the slicing done in one session, brings the minutes down more than any change in ingredients.

The price

At a 55% margin after 3% card fees: $0.93 ÷ (1 − 0.55 − 0.03) = $2.22, rounded up to $2.25. That leaves $1.25 a piece after the fees and every cost.

Prices for each channel

The bag of eight uses one bigger bag, 45 cents, instead of eight small ones, and sells for less than eight singles; it still leaves $6.48 against $10.00 for eight singles, and it sells to people who wouldn't buy eight singles. The café single leaves only 28 cents, because a café selling at $2.50 needs to pay about half; it pays its way as volume, a jar by the register refilled every week, and as a place people taste them before buying a bag. The tin costs $2.50 empty and sells in November and December. How to price for shops and cafés is in how to price baked goods for wholesale.

What moves the cost

• The nuts. Almonds at $8 a pound instead of $6 add 3 cents a piece; pistachios add more.
• The dip. Dipping one end instead of the whole bottom halves the chocolate, about 2½ cents a piece.
• Batch size. Four batches baked and sliced together cut the labor a piece by about a third.
• The slice. Thinner slices give more pieces from a log and a crisper cookie; weigh a log and count the slices to see what you're getting.

Get the calculator

Download the biscotti pricing calculator. Type each ingredient's amount and price for a batch, how many pieces it makes, the hands-on minutes, your hourly rate, the bag, the kitchen's share, your card fees and the margin you want. The full cost, the price for your margin, rounded up to the nearest 25 cents, and what's left at that price, at a wholesale price and at a price you want to test all fill in. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

Five flavors, each its own recipe from the same flour, eggs and sugar but different nuts and chocolate; bags, tins and café jars, each with its own packaging; and almond prices that move with every order. A one-recipe calculator says what an almond biscotti cost last spring; it can't say what the pistachio ones cost this month, or whether there's chocolate for the December tins.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack costs every batch from what you paid, with its labor minutes.

Each batch at what it used. A batch takes its flour, almonds and chocolate off stock at what they cost, with its labor minutes, so each flavor's cost comes from its own batches, and moves when almonds do.

Packs as recipes. A bag of eight is a recipe of eight biscotti, a bag and a label; a tin is sixteen biscotti, a tin and a ribbon, so packing them takes the biscotti and the packaging off stock, and their cost includes both. "What could I make right now" says how many tins the biscotti and empty tins on hand allow.

Margins by product and customer. Margins are reported by product and by customer, so the cafés' singles and the market's bags each show what they leave. How recipes inside recipes work is in what is a bill of materials for food.

Recipes, batches and margin reports are on every plan, from $49 a month. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How much should I sell biscotti for?

Enough to cover the full cost and your margin. In the example, a chocolate-dipped almond biscotti costs 93 cents to make and sells for $2.25, or $14 for a bag of eight.

How much does it cost to make biscotti?

In the example, 24 cents of ingredients, 10 cents of packaging, 47 cents of labor and 12 cents of the kitchen: 93 cents a piece.

What should I charge a café for biscotti?

About half the café's shelf price. In the example, $1.25 a wrapped single for a café that sells it at $2.50.

Do biscotti sell well at farmers markets?

They keep for weeks and travel well, so bags and tins suit a market, and leftovers aren't lost.