Your kitchen, or a licensed space
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The three routes
- License a space of your own. Highest fixed cost, full control of the calendar, and the only route where the equipment is set up the way a thick sauce needs.
- Rent a shared or commissary kitchen. Low fixed cost, and you are working with whatever kettle is there.
- Use a co-packer. Somebody else makes it to your specification. Lowest operational burden, highest minimum order, least control over the thing carrying your name.
Why the equipment question bites harder here
A thick sauce wants a kettle you can hold at temperature without scorching the bottom, and a commissary is unlikely to have one. Working around it means smaller batches, more stirring and more scorch risk, which is a real cost rather than an inconvenience. It is the main reason sauce makers move out of shared kitchens earlier than makers of thinner products.
Cost per jar, at the volume you will actually make
Compare them at first-season volume rather than at the volume you hope for. An hourly commissary rate is cheap until the reduction takes longer than planned, and a co-packer minimum that looks reasonable annually can be more jars than you can sell.
Ask the co-packer whose process it is
If they make it to their own filed process, you are buying their product with your label on it, and leaving later means establishing your own anyway. Ask at the start rather than at the point you want to move.
The route usually changes as the volume does
Most makers who last do not stay on one of these. A first season in a commissary proves the product and the demand without committing capital, and the move to a licensed room follows once the kettle limitation starts costing more than the rent saves. Planning that sequence deliberately is cheaper than discovering it, because the equipment that suits a shared kitchen and the equipment that suits your own room are not the same list.
Whichever route you take, ask what happens to your process documentation if the arrangement ends. A filed process established for your formulation should follow you; one established for somebody else’s line does not, and finding that out while moving is the worst time.