To price a cup of fresh lemonade you add up its full cost first: the lemons, sugar and ice by the batch, your time at an hourly rate, the cup, lid and straw, and a share of overhead like rent and power. That's what one cup costs you. Then set the price so that, after card and selling fees, it leaves the margin you want: price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin − fee rate). For a 16-ounce cup of fresh-squeezed lemonade that costs $1.97 to make, a 65% margin after 3% fees means $6.16, rounded up to $6.25. At festivals the booth fee is the biggest cost after squeezing time, so it goes into overhead a cup. Pre-orders for school and team events are a lower price, set so it still covers the full cost with something left. In the example below, a South Carolina lemonade stand prices its cups for a summer of festivals.
The short version
- Full cost = ingredients a cup + your time + cup, lid and straw + overhead.
- Price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin − fee rate).
- Count your time at a real hourly rate, even if you don't pay yourself yet.
- Put the booth fee into overhead, divided by the cups you expect to sell.
- Lemons swing in price; buy by the case.
- Check what wholesale leaves after full cost before saying yes.
- TaroStack costs each cup from its recipe and what each batch used. More below.
What goes into a cup's cost
| Part | How to count it |
|---|---|
| Ingredients | The batch's cost ÷ cups a batch |
| Your time | Hands-on minutes for the batch ÷ cups × your hourly rate |
| Cup, lid and straw | Per cup |
| Overhead | Rent, power, tools, spread over the cups you make |
| Fees | Card and market fees as a share of the price |
Kids' stands and the home rules are in can you sell lemonade from home, and another cold drink in iced tea business plan.
An example: a cup at a summer festival
Shoreline Squeeze, a made-up lemonade stand in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, makes five gallons at a time, 50 cups, and spreads a $100 booth fee over the 150 cups it expects to sell:
| Ingredient | Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Lemons | 40 | $16.00 |
| Sugar | 5 lb | $4.00 |
| Ice | 20 lb | $4.00 |
| A batch | $24.00 |
| A cup | Cost |
|---|---|
| Ingredients, $24.00 ÷ 50 | $0.48 |
| Time, 90 minutes for the batch at $20 an hour ÷ 50 | $0.60 |
| Cup, lid and straw | $0.22 |
| Overhead | $0.67 |
| Full cost | $1.97 |
At a 65% margin after 3% card fees, the price is $1.97 ÷ 0.32 = $6.16, so $6.25. At $6.25 a cup, each leaves $4.09. It had been asking $6, which leaves $3.85, and kept $6. A school field day pre-ordered cups at $3.50, which leaves $1.42 each, with no booth fee. Lemons are 32 cents a cup, and a case bought at the warehouse instead of the grocery store saves about 8 of them. How a price becomes a margin is in what is a good profit margin for a food product.
Get the calculator
Download the lemonade price calculator. One sheet: type the batch's ingredients, amounts and costs, the cups it makes, the hands-on minutes, the cup and overhead, your hourly rate, card fees and the margin you want; the full cost, the price for your margin rounded up, and what a wholesale price and a test price leave fill in. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.
Where this stops working
The calculator prices a cup on paper. A rainy festival day that sells 60 cups instead of 150 puts more of the booth fee on each one.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack costs each cup from its recipe and from what each batch used.
Recipes by weight. Each cup is a recipe, with unit conversion from the case or sack to the gram.
True cost from the batch. Each batch takes ingredients at their real cost, from the deliveries they came from, so a price rise shows up in the next batch.
Price creep. A price-creep report per supplier shows which ingredient is quietly costing more.
| The job | Spreadsheet | In TaroStack |
|---|---|---|
| What a cup costs this week | Last season's sheet | True cost from the batch |
| Lemonade poured out at close | Not counted | Waste with a reason |
| An ingredient creeping up | Noticed at tax time | A price-creep report |
| Whether wholesale still pays | A guess | Margins on real cost |
Recipes, batches and true cost 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.