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Reply to "A Case Study of Cookie Cost (from Gathering Ingredients to Packing)"

Hi, I'm SO glad to see someone who actually took the time to time all of the steps that go into making a decorated cookie! Congratulations! I think if more people did the same thing, they would realize they are charging way too little for their cookies and are actually losing money. (Also to remember, most cookie videos are heavily edited and often fast-forwarded, so times displayed on them are rarely an accurate indicator of real cookie decorating time.)

However, you forgot to add a markup to cover your overhead costs (electricity, facility rent or lease, water, etc.) and to also make a profit. If you pay all of your price charged to the person you hire to decorate (or to you), there will be no money left over to pay utilities/rent or to put away for investments in equipment to grow the business. Many decorators forget this point, and you can never grow out of your home and into a bigger, sustainable business if you don't factor in these elements. (Please see our blog posts under the "Business of Baking" blog category; we have some awesome articles there about pricing.) Thus, your computed cost should be even higher than $10 per cookie.

That all being said, you can achieve economies of scale (drive unit - per cookie -costs down) by making more things in larger bulk batches. It's never most efficient to do small, custom orders. But this mostly applies to the mixing of dough and some simpler decorating tasks. And, again, you might need to invest in larger mixers in order to realize these savings over time. As you can see from your analysis, the bulk of your time is spent in decorating activities, which are hard to scale up and do faster, so in order to cut costs here, one needs to think seriously about making simpler, more easily reproducible designs (and/or hiring cheaper labor.)

On the labor point: in the US, minimum hourly wage is less than $25 in many states (it's not even $15 here in Missouri), so you might be able to carve out some cost there. BUT, if it is you or another very talented person decorating the cookies, you need to be mindful of how you value your/their time. I charge a three-digit figure (per hour) for my time in consultations and teaching, so that's why I no longer bake cookies for sale. I'd rather spend my scarce time making more money and not repeating cookie designs over and over for customers.

So, to answer your question about whether there is a market for a $10 cookie (or more, if you were to add overhead costs and profit), I cannot say for Dubai (perhaps there is), but it is tough to make this sort of sale here without lots of customer education and customers with deep pockets. I was able to command these sorts of cookie prices when I had my bakery, but I also made other things (namely higher margin wedding cakes and simpler sweets). If I had to rely on cookie sales alone in my bakery, it would have never made any money. So, for me, product diversification, not only design simplification, was key to the bakery's success.

I hope this helps a bit.

Last edited by Julia M. Usher
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