What the money actually costs
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Equipment, roughly in the order you need it
An order to buy into rather than a list to clear at once. Each item removes a specific failure, and buying ahead of the failure ties up money the first season needs for ingredients.
- A pH meter and buffers. This is the measurement the product is defined by, so it is first rather than last.
- A thermometer you have calibrated, because fill temperature is a control and not a feeling.
- A kettle you can hold at temperature without scorching the bottom.
- Jars, lids and a canner sized to them.
- A scale. Everything downstream is weights.
Where the money actually goes
Not on any of that. The dominant early cost is the scheduled process: professional work done on your specific formulation, with a lead time that belongs to somebody else. People budget for pans and are surprised by this, usually at the point they have already bought ingredients.
The consolation is that it is per formulation rather than per batch or per season. One sauce, filed once, makes every jar of that sauce you ever sell. It is the clearest argument on this property for depth before breadth.
The cost that gets forgotten
Energy, and specifically time at temperature. A thick sauce is held hot for a long while and then processed, and that is a materially bigger energy bill than the same volume of a thin product. Meter a full production day once so the number in your pricing is measured rather than assumed.
The other one is scorch loss. A thick sauce burns onto the bottom of a kettle and what burns on is product you paid for and then scrubbed off.
None of this is a reason not to start. It is a reason to start with one sauce rather than three, because the costs that hurt are per formulation and the costs that are cheap are per batch.
The equipment also holds its value badly and your process does not. A kettle can be sold on; a filed process for your formulation is worth nothing to anybody else and everything to you, which is a useful way to think about where the money is actually going.