How to Price Homemade Sourdough Bread (With Calculator)

Price a homemade sourdough loaf from its full cost: the flour, salt and starter, the bag and label, the oven, your hands-on time and a share of overhead, then add the margin you want and check it against what bakers near you charge. Ingredients are the small part. In the example below, a loaf's ingredients cost $1.50, but the full cost is $7.43, because a home oven bakes two at a time and a batch of eight takes an hour and three quarters of hands-on work. At $12, the loaf earns a 38% margin and pays about $41 for each hands-on hour; at $8, about $23 an hour and almost no margin. Below is the cost worked through, the prices compared, what changes the numbers, and a free calculator.

The short version

• Cost the ingredients per loaf, including the flour in your starter.
• Add the bag, label and parchment, and the oven's power.
• Add your hands-on minutes per loaf at an hourly rate; this is usually the biggest line.
• Add a share of overhead: insurance, permit, website, market fees.
• Price for the margin you want, then check the local market.
• Bigger batches cut the labor per loaf more than anything else.
• TaroStack keeps each loaf's cost current from what you paid for flour, batch by batch. More below.

Step 1: ingredients per loaf

For one loaf of about 900 g of dough, baked to about 800 g:

The starter isn't free: feeding it uses flour, and the discard you throw away is part of the cost. How to cost any recipe by weight is in how to price baked goods.

Step 2: the full cost

The hands-on time is mixing, the folds, shaping, loading and unloading the oven, cooling, bagging and cleaning up, not the hours the dough sits. How to work out a labor line is in how to compute labor cost in baking.

Step 3: the price

Margin                        = (price − full cost) ÷ price
Pay for each hands-on hour    = (price − everything but labor) × loaves ÷ hands-on hours
                              = (price − $3.05) × 8 ÷ 1.75

At $8, your hands-on hours earn about what you'd pay a helper, and the business earns almost nothing on top, so there's nothing for a slow market or a loaf that collapses. At $12, there is. Then check what other bakers at your market or in your area charge, and how yours compares: a $12 loaf next to $9 loaves needs to look and taste like it. Whether the whole bakery adds up is in is a home bakery profitable.

What changes the numbers most

Wholesale sourdough works at bigger batches and with an oven that bakes more than two at a time. How to price for wholesale is in how to price baked goods for wholesale.

Get the calculator

Download the sourdough price calculator. Type your recipe in grams with what you pay for each ingredient, your packaging, oven, hands-on minutes, loaves per batch and overhead; it works out the full cost per loaf, the price for the margin you want, and, for any price, the margin and what each hands-on hour earns. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

The calculator gives you a price on the day you fill it in. Then flour goes up, you switch to a different whole wheat, a humid week means two collapsed loaves in every batch, and the $7.43 you priced against is really $8. The price list still says $12, and the margin you chose is quietly smaller.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack keeps the cost of every loaf current, from the flour you bought to the loaves that came out.

The recipe, with its starter. Each loaf is a recipe, and the starter is a sub-recipe inside it, so its flour counts. Units convert: buy flour by the 50 lb bag, use it by the gram. Recipes have versions, so the loaf with the new whole wheat is recorded as the new version.

Each batch, costed. Record a bake and TaroStack takes the flour, salt and bags off stock from the lots you used, at what you paid for them, and divides the cost by the loaves that came out good. A batch of eight that gave seven shows a higher cost per loaf, and recipe truth shows whether it keeps happening. Margins are reported per product on what each one actually cost, so you see if the $12 loaf still makes 38%.

And the flour doesn't run out. The reorder list shows flour in days of cover at the rate your bakes use it, with a red line where an order placed today would arrive too late. Stock is counted on a phone, and flour can be tracked by lot, so if a flour is ever recalled, one report shows which bakes used it.

Stock, counts, lots and a Square or Shopify connection are on every plan, from $49 a month; recipes, bakes with their cost and recipe truth are on Standard at $99. 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 homemade sourdough bread for?

Price from the full cost, not the ingredients. In the example, a loaf costing $7.43 all in earns a 38% margin at $12. Then check what other bakers near you charge.

How much does it cost to make a loaf of sourdough?

The ingredients are about $1.50 in the example. With the bag, the oven, your hands-on time and overhead, the full cost is $7.43 a loaf in batches of eight.

Is selling sourdough bread profitable?

It can be, at a price that covers your time. At $12, the example loaf pays about $41 for each hands-on hour; at $8, about $23, with almost no margin left over.

How do I lower the cost of my sourdough?

Bake more per session: in the example, 16 loaves instead of 8 cuts the full cost from $7.43 to $6.49. Buying flour by the 50 lb bag and losing fewer loaves help too.