What to charge
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What goes into a bottle
- Raw material, at the ratio it actually reduces by rather than the one you hope for.
- Fuel or power to evaporate, which is the line most costings omit.
- Bottle, closure and label.
- Labor, including the parts of the day that are waiting.
- Filter material, which is consumed rather than owned.
- Yield loss: what stayed in the pan, what went to seconds, what was lost to a scorched or off-density batch.
Meter the energy once and stop guessing
Removing most of the weight of a raw material as water takes real energy, and the figure is specific to your equipment. Meter a full production day rather than estimating it, and use that number. An operation that estimates this is usually under by a margin large enough to matter.
Weigh in and weigh out
Starting weight of raw material and finished weight of salable syrup, every batch. That gives a true yield rather than a nominal one, and the gap between them is where the unrecorded losses live.
Freight on a dense product
Syrup in glass is heavy. If you ship, freight belongs in the model rather than being treated as the customer’s problem, because it is what turns a mail order into a quote nobody accepts. The small gift sizes carry it best and the retail middle carries it worst.
Wholesale is a separate calculation
Not retail with a discount. It has to leave the buyer a margin and still cover a cost per bottle that includes the consistency work wholesale demands. Work it out from the cost up rather than down from the shelf price.
Price the gift size as a different product
The small sizes carry the highest price per unit of volume and the highest share of fixed cost per bottle, because a 100 ml bottle and a 473 ml bottle cost nearly the same to fill, label and handle. Costing them from a per-ounce figure throws that away and makes the small size look like the profitable one when it is often the opposite.
The honest way round is to cost a bottle as a bottle: contents plus packaging plus the handling that does not scale with volume, then decide what each format has to earn.