To price a 4-ounce soft pretzel you add up its full cost first: the flour, malt, butter and lye by the batch, your time at an hourly rate, the paper bag, and a share of overhead like rent and power. That's what one pretzel 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 4-ounce soft pretzel that costs $1.33 to make, a 70% margin after 3% fees means $4.93, rounded up to $5.00. The ingredients are a small part of a pretzel's cost; shaping, and the market's tent, fees and kitchen hours, are most of it. A coffee shop pays less a pretzel and warms them itself. In the example below, a Cincinnati pretzel maker prices its pretzels for a market and a coffee shop.
The short version
- Full cost = flour, malt, butter and lye a pretzel + your time + paper bag + overhead.
- Price = full cost ÷ (1 − margin − fee rate).
- Count your time at a real hourly rate, even if you don't pay yourself yet.
- Count the market's fee and the kitchen hours in the overhead.
- Shaping 200 pretzels takes hours: count them.
- Check what wholesale leaves after full cost before saying yes.
- TaroStack costs each pretzel from its recipe and what each batch used. More below.
What goes into a pretzel's cost
| Part | How to count it |
|---|---|
| Flour, malt, butter and lye | The batch's cost ÷ pretzels a batch |
| Your time | Hands-on minutes for the batch ÷ pretzels × your hourly rate |
| Paper bag | Per pretzel |
| Overhead | Rent, power, tools, spread over the pretzels you make |
| Fees | Card and market fees as a share of the price |
The pretzel business's year is in pretzel business plan, and the market permit in temporary food permit.
An example: a soft pretzel
Vine Street Pretzel Works, the made-up soft pretzel maker in Cincinnati, Ohio, I use in these examples, shapes, dips and bakes 200 pretzels for a Saturday market:
| A batch of 200 pretzels | Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Bread flour | 33 lb | $18.15 |
| Malt, yeast, salt and butter | $14.85 | |
| Food-grade lye and coarse salt | $3.00 | |
| A batch | $36.00 |
| A pretzel | Cost |
|---|---|
| Flour, malt, butter and lye, $36.00 ÷ 200 | $0.18 |
| Time, 240 minutes for the batch at $20 an hour ÷ 200 | $0.40 |
| Paper bag | $0.05 |
| Overhead | $0.70 |
| Full cost | $1.33 |
At a 70% margin after 3% card fees, the price is $1.33 ÷ 0.27 = $4.93, so $5.00. At $5.00 a pretzel, each leaves $3.52. The tent had said $4.00 in its first season, which leaves $2.55. A coffee shop's $2.00 leaves $0.61: thin, so the shop gets the giant pretzels instead, which keep more. Pricing other baked goods works the same way, in how to price baked goods.
Get the calculator
Download the soft pretzel price calculator. One sheet: type the batch's ingredients, amounts and costs, the pretzels it makes, the hands-on minutes, the bag 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 one batch. A rainy Saturday sells half, butter prices move, and the pretzels left at close change what each one sold really cost.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack costs each pretzel from its recipe and from what each batch used.
Recipes by weight. Each pretzel 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 pretzel costs this week | Last season's sheet | True cost from the batch |
| Pretzels left at close | Not counted | Waste by 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.