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How to Price Your Bread So You Can Pay Yourself $1,000 a Month | Episode 98

  • Aug 28, 2025
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


The first time I heard another baker talk about her $1,000 weeks, it was a light bulb moment for me. I was sending out resumes at the time, genuinely needing a job, and I had no idea that selling bread could turn into real money for my family.


What I did not have was a structure. I was baking and selling and hoping the math worked out somewhere in the middle, which is how most of us start.


So let's build the structure. The goal is $1,000 a month landing in your household bank account, not $1,000 in sales, and it starts with knowing what your products actually cost you and what margin each one leaves behind. If you want to pay yourself $2,000 or $3,000, the same math scales.


Numbers did not come naturally to me either. I used to say math was not my thing. Getting comfortable with my numbers is the difference I have seen between a baker building something for the long haul and one who stays in survival mode, trying everything and never quite sure what is working.


Start with what one gram costs you

Sit down with your receipts. A spreadsheet is nice, a notebook and a pencil works just as well.


For every ingredient you buy, write down three things:

  • The ingredient and the package size you actually buy.

  • What that package costs you.

  • How many grams are in it. If the package does not list grams, ask Google to convert pounds to grams.

So your line for flour might read: flour, 10 pound bag, $10, 4,540 grams.


Then divide the price by the grams to get your cost per gram. Ten dollars divided by 4,540 grams comes out to a little over two tenths of a cent per gram. If you are in a spreadsheet it will show as $0.00 at first and look wrong. It is not wrong, you just need to add decimal places so you can see it.


Do this for every ingredient in every recipe you sell: flour, salt, butter, milk, eggs, chocolate chips, your inclusions, all of it. For my starter I calculate the flour that goes into it and divide by two, since I keep a one to one ratio of flour and water. I do not calculate my water, though you can with the same formula.


And please include your packaging, the bags and boxes and labels. Packaging is a real ingredient in your cost and it is the one bakers forget most often.


Turn cost per gram into cost per loaf

Once you have cost per gram, multiply it by the grams you use in the recipe.


Say your recipe makes two loaves and uses 1,000 grams of flour. At two tenths of a cent per gram, that is $2.22 of flour in the batch, so $1.11 of flour per loaf. Add the salt, the starter, any inclusions, and the packaging, and you have your true cost per loaf.


This part is tedious, and it is the most important hour you will spend on your business this month. Do not tell yourself you will come back to it later, and do not calculate the flour and call it done.


If you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself, I made a Profit & Pricing Calculator in Google Sheets that runs these calculations for you once you enter your ingredients and recipes. It is optional. The method above works perfectly well on paper.


Now price the product

A simple rule of thumb is to multiply your cost by three or four. It is not a law for every product, and it is a good place to start.


Here is what that looks like with easy numbers. Your loaf costs you $3 to make once you count the flour, salt, starter and packaging, and you sell it for $10. That leaves you $7, which is a 70 percent profit margin.


That $7 has a lot of work to do. It covers your pay, your overhead like electricity and water and your software subscriptions, your taxes, and the money you set aside for savings and future equipment. Seven dollars goes fast that way, which is why I want at least half of my menu sitting at a higher margin.


My focaccia runs about 89 percent. If I sell it for $10, my ingredients and packaging are around $1.10, so nearly $9 is left over. It is quick to make, it scales easily, and it sells fast, so I lean into it hard.


The formula for your profit margin

Take your selling price and subtract your cost. That gives you your margin in dollars. Then divide that margin by your selling price and multiply by 100 to get your margin as a percentage.

  • A $10 loaf that costs you $3 leaves a $7 margin, which is 70 percent.

  • A $12 product that costs you $2 leaves a $10 margin, which is 83 percent.

Run that number for every item on your menu and write the percentage next to it. That single list will tell you more about your business than anything else you do this month.


What to do when a product is not profitable

I calculated my brownies and they came out around 59 percent. I was pricing a four by four square at $5 and it was costing me close to $2.50 to make and package. That does not leave enough to cover everything the money has to cover.


So I switched to a two inch by four inch rectangle and priced it at $4. I get more pieces out of the same pan, my margin moved back into the 70s, and customers did not bat an eye. The next week when I did not bring them, everybody asked where they were!


When you find an underpriced product, you have a few good options:

  • Raise the price and keep selling it.

  • Change the portion size so you get more out of the same pan or the same batch.

  • Take it off your menu for a couple of months, then bring it back at the higher price.

  • Look at the packaging, which is sometimes where the money is leaking.

Get out of your head about raising prices. Everyone knows costs have gone up everywhere. If yours have gone up, your prices should too.


When someone pushes back

You might hear a comment when you adjust your prices, and it is not a reason to reverse the decision. One or two people pushing back is not enough feedback to lower a price.


Think about how you shop. I do not love the prices at my grocery store, and I have never walked up to the manager to ask him to lower them. If I value the product, I pay for it. If I do not, I find something else, and that is exactly what your customers do.


There is a market for J.Crew and there is a market for Gucci. If you are the Gucci baker, do not feel bad when someone shops at J.Crew. Serve the customers who value what you make.


There is no way any one of us can bake for a whole community, even a small one. If a baker down the road prices lower with conventional ingredients while you use organic, you are both going to be fine.


For the baker who already has a full menu

If you have been selling for a year or more, do not start with pricing. Start with an audit.


List every product you sell, put its true cost and its margin percentage beside it, and then add one more column: how many of that item you sold last month. Now you can see which products are actually carrying your income and which ones are costing you a bake day.


You are looking for items that are fast to make, sell consistently, use few expensive inclusions, and hold a high margin. Those are the ones to build your menu around. My chocolate chip cookies sit closer to 70 percent because chocolate and butter and eggs are expensive, and I sell a baker's dozen for $30, which is what my market supports. I can carry that lower margin because my focaccia is doing the heavy lifting.


A few high-margin workhorses give you room to keep the lower-margin favorites your customers love.


Final thoughts

This is part one of two. Here we got your costs on paper and your margins calculated. In part two I walk through how to take that margin and split it into your pay, your taxes, your overhead and your savings, so you can reverse engineer the $1,000.


Go do the cost work first. Pick three products, calculate them all the way down to the packaging, and write the margin next to each one. If numbers overwhelm you, do one product, step outside, and come back for the next.


I am proud of you for sitting down with this! Taking ownership of your numbers is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself and for the business you are building.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


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If this was helpful, here is where to go next.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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