How to Price Homemade Brownies, With a Calculator

To price homemade brownies, work out what one costs, its share of the pan's ingredients, its wrapper, your time and a little overhead, then divide by one minus the margin you want. A 9 by 13 pan of good fudge brownies is about $6.50 of butter, chocolate, eggs and sugar. How you cut it changes everything after that: 12 large brownies are 54 cents of ingredients each, 24 small ones 27 cents, and every one has to be cut, bagged and stickered by hand. In the example below, baking two pans at once, a large brownie costs $1.68 and sells for $3.75, a small one costs $1.00 and sells for $2.25, and a café paying $2.50 wholesale for a large one leaves $0.82. Below is what a pan costs, the cut, the bake, retail and wholesale prices, and a free calculator.

The short version

• Cost the pan: in the example, $6.50 of ingredients for a 9 by 13.
• Divide by the number you cut: 12 large or 24 small.
• Add the wrapper, 15 cents for a bag and sticker, and the 30 seconds it takes to put it on.
• Add your hands-on time for the bake, spread over every brownie in it.
• Add overhead, the oven, power and a share of rent, about $2.40 a pan.
• Price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin). At 55%, a $1.68 brownie is $3.75.
• TaroStack costs every bake from what its ingredients actually cost. More below.

What a pan costs

Lakeshore Brownie Co., a made-up bakery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I use in these examples, makes fudge brownies in 9 by 13 pans:

Butter and chocolate are 62% of the pan, so they're the two prices worth checking every time you restock. How to turn a package price into the cost of what a recipe uses is in how to calculate cost per ounce.

The cut and the bake

Mixing, baking, cooling, cutting and cleaning up take about 35 minutes for one pan, or 45 for two baked together. Then each brownie takes about 30 seconds to bag and sticker.

Two things show. A second pan in the same bake takes a dollar off a large brownie's price, because the mixing bowl, the oven and the cleanup are shared. And the wrapper is a bigger share of a small brownie than a large one: on a $1.00 brownie, 15 cents of bag and 17 cents of bagging time are a third of the cost. How to put your time into any baked good is in how to compute labor cost in baking.

Retail and wholesale

Sold direct, at a market or to order, the large brownie is $3.75, or $45 a dozen. A café might sell a large brownie at $4.50 to $5 and, buying wholesale, expect to pay about half that, around $2.50:

Wholesale leaves $0.82, less than half of a direct sale, but a café ordering four dozen a week is 48 brownies sold with no market stall and no Saturday. It works only if the bake is big enough to keep the cost down: from a single pan, the same brownie costs $2.03 and the café's $2.50 leaves 47 cents. How to set a wholesale price that still pays is in how to price baked goods for wholesale.

Get the calculator

Download the brownie pricing calculator. Type your own bake into the shaded cells: what a pan's ingredients cost, how many you cut, pans baked at once, your hands-on minutes, the seconds to wrap each one, the bag and sticker, your time, overhead a pan, the margin you want and a café's wholesale price. It works out the full cost of a brownie, the price rounded up to the next quarter, a dozen's price, and what the wholesale price leaves. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

The calculator is one brownie at one butter price. A baker with fudge, blondies, salted caramel and a gluten-free tray, three cafés with standing orders and butter that's gone up twice since spring has a cost per brownie that's always behind, and the café that pays $2.50 may be the one losing money.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack keeps the cost of every bake current.

Recipes and bakes. Each brownie is a recipe, and units convert: chocolate bought by the 10-pound block, used by the ounce. Recording a bake takes the ingredients off stock at what you paid, and divides by the brownies that came out of it, so the cost follows butter and chocolate without anyone updating a sheet.

The cafés' orders. Standing café orders are sales orders for their delivery day, and margins are reported by product and by customer, so the café whose price stopped paying shows up.

And the chocolate before it runs out. The reorder list works in days of cover at the rate each ingredient really moves, and a price-creep report per supplier shows whose prices are rising.

Recipes, batches and margins by product and customer 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 charge for homemade brownies?

Work out the full cost of one, ingredients, wrapper, your time and overhead, and divide by one minus your margin. In the example, a large brownie costing $1.68 sells for $3.75, and a small one costing $1.00 for $2.25.

How much does it cost to make a pan of brownies?

In the example, $6.50 of ingredients for a 9 by 13 pan of fudge brownies, with butter and chocolate the biggest part. With wrapping, time and overhead, each of 12 large brownies costs $1.68 from a two-pan bake.

How much should I charge a café for brownies?

About half what the café charges. In the example, a café selling large brownies at $4.50 to $5 pays $2.50, which leaves the baker $0.82 a brownie from a two-pan bake.

Is a brownie business profitable?

It can be, sold direct: a large brownie leaves about $2 at $3.75. Wholesale leaves less than a dollar, so it depends on baking enough at once to keep the cost per brownie down.