What to charge
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What goes into a jar
- Nuts, which are most of it and which move with harvests.
- Jar, closure and label, with glass freight attached.
- Energy for the roast and the grind.
- Labor, which for this craft is mostly roasting, filling and cleaning.
- Verification: roast validation amortized, supplier documentation, any testing program.
- Loss: product left in the grinder, jars broken, batches rejected.
Price for a bad nut year
Nut prices move with weather in a small number of growing regions and can move sharply. A price set on a good year with a thin margin is a price that becomes unworkable through nothing you did, and raising a retail price is harder than setting it correctly.
What stays in the grinder is a real number
Weigh what goes in and what gets jarred, for a few runs, and use the actual yield rather than the theoretical one. On a product where the input is the dominant cost, a few percent left in equipment is a meaningful share of the margin.
You are competing against a very cheap product
Supermarket peanut butter is made at a scale you cannot approach, and some buyers will compare directly. The answer is not to price against it; it is to be clearly a different product, which usually means the ingredient list and the format rather than the marketing.
Wholesale is a separate calculation
Not retail with a discount. It has to leave the buyer a margin and still cover a cost per jar that includes the documentation and consistency wholesale demands. Work it from the cost up.
The sampler earns its place differently
A small jar is rarely profitable on its own and it is how somebody tries a product that costs several times what they usually pay. Cost it honestly, accept that it is close to a marketing expense, and judge it on whether buyers come back for the full size rather than on its own margin.
Set the price with enough room that a bad crop year is a squeeze rather than a crisis, because raising a shelf price is much harder than starting at the right one.