Having someone else make it
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What they actually sell you
A copacker sells capacity and a process, not a recipe and not a brand. Being clear about which parts remain yours is the difference between a useful arrangement and one where you no longer control your own product.
- Throughput. Filling, lidding and processing at a rate one kitchen cannot reach.
- A licensed facility, which opens wholesale without you leasing anything.
- Formats you cannot make, including sealed single-serve.
- Usually, a process authority relationship if the product needs one.
What it costs beyond money
The price per jar is the easy part to compare. What is harder to price is what you give up, and it is worth naming before signing rather than discovering it in the second season.
- A minimum run. Ask the number first, because it decides whether the conversation is worth having.
- A specification rather than a recipe. They need weights, a target reading, a process and a shelf life, which is why the batch log matters before you call.
- Your fruit, delivered in a form and quantity they can take, which is rarely the way you buy it.
- Control of the exact product. A copacked jam is close to yours, not identical.
The seasonal mismatch
A copacker runs to their calendar and your fruit runs to its own. Those two calendars are the thing most likely to break the arrangement, and they break it in the one month you cannot reschedule.
This is the real problem for a fruit product. A copacker wants a run; your fruit arrives in a three-week window and is gone. Bridging that means freezing or pulping fruit for a later run, which is a cost and a quality question of its own.
When it is the right answer
There are situations where this is clearly the correct move rather than a compromise, and they are worth recognizing because the arrangement gets dismissed too early by people who would benefit from it. Volume you cannot physically make yourself is the clearest of them. A wholesale order that would take your whole season to fill is not an argument for working harder.
When you have demand you cannot fill and a fruit supply you can commit to in advance. Not before, because a minimum run of jam you cannot sell is worse than a bottling day that is too long.