What to charge
Updated
On this page4
Working it out from the ratio
Price starts from the ratio rather than from the recipe, because the ratio fixes the proportion of your most expensive input. At 45 parts fruit you know roughly what the contents of a jar cost before you know anything else about it, which makes this the one calculation worth doing first.
- Start from the ratio, not from the recipe. At minimum, 45 parts fruit to 55 parts sweetener by weight, 47 for Group I fruits.
- Cost the fruit at what you actually paid, including the fraction you threw away.
- Add the sugar, the pectin if any, the acid, the jar, the lid and the label.
- Add the energy for a long boil, which is not trivial on a thin margin.
- Add your time at a real rate, including the batch log and the cleanup.
- Then compare that to what the shelf will carry, and if it does not work the answer is a different fruit or a different size, not less fruit.
Where the cost actually sits
Most of a jar of jam is fruit and sugar by weight and fruit by cost. The packaging matters less than people expect and the labor matters more, which is the opposite of how most first attempts at pricing are structured.
Fruit and glass, in that order, and both are bought in units that do not match a batch. A case of jars is a case whether you fill 40 or 48, and fruit is bought by the flat. Yield is the number that connects them and it is on how much a batch makes.
The reduced-sugar trap
Less sugar sounds like a cheaper product and is usually a more expensive one, for a reason that is worth understanding before pricing a line around it. Sugar is the cheap half of the jar and it is also the half doing the preserving, so taking it out means replacing its function with something that costs more and often shortens shelf life as well.
Cutting sugar to cut cost does not work: sugar is cheap, it is the fruit that is expensive, and a reduced-sugar product is a different standard with different pectin. That is on sugar is not there for sweetness.