What to charge
Updated
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What goes into a jar
- Ingredients, including the acid, bought to a stated strength.
- Jar, closure and label.
- Prep labor, which scales exactly with volume.
- Time at temperature: reduction energy, and it is not small.
- Scorch and yield loss, which is real and usually unrecorded.
- The scheduled process, amortized across every jar of that formulation.
The two that get left out
Energy and yield loss. A thick sauce is held hot for a long time and some of it does not make it into a jar. Both are invisible in a recipe costing and both are material at volume. Meter one full production day and weigh what you started with against what you filled; use those numbers rather than an estimate made while optimistic.
Freight on a heavy product
Glass full of sauce is dense. If you ship at all, the freight belongs in the model rather than being treated as something the customer deals with, and it is the line that most often turns a mail order into a quote nobody accepts.
Wholesale is a different number
Not retail with a discount. It has to leave room for the buyer and still cover a cost per jar that includes the consistency work wholesale demands, which is real work a market stall does not require. Work it out separately rather than deriving one from the other.
Price for the second product before you need it
If the first sauce is priced to just work, there is nothing to fund the next filed process out of, and a second product becomes a thing you cannot afford rather than a thing you choose. Build that cost into the first product deliberately, because the alternative is a business that can only ever sell one sauce.
That is also the honest answer to anybody comparing your price to a supermarket sauce. They are amortizing a process over millions of jars and you are amortizing one over thousands.