I see a lot of new bakers asking about how to determine the best cake prices for their customers. If you’re thinking that you cannot make your cake prices as high as other professionals because you don’t have a bakery shop or a tv show you are making a huge mistake. The fact is that you are providing a service and you deserve to get paid for it.
My wife, Renee, and I struggled with this as well so don’t feel bad. I’m going to share our method for determining cake prices and how we used this method to also price out custom cakes. It takes a bit of work at first, but as you use it more and more it will get super easy.
Step 1: Determine Your Base Prices
Here is the trick: break everything down to common units. For cake batter and icing the common unit is a cup. For fondant it is an ounce. For your work it’s an hour. Once you figure out what these units cost you can quickly price out any cake and you can do it very quickly.
Step 2: Calculate Cake Prices
For example, let’s say you have a sheet cake with buttercream icing. Let’s also assume that vanilla cake batter costs $1.20 per cup and vanilla buttercream costs $.75 per cup. Using the info on Wilton’s site you will find that an 11×15 sheet cake with two layers requires 12 cups of batter and 9 cups of icing. Now multiply the cups needed by your calculated cost per cup and you get $14.40 + $6.75 = $21.15. We multiplied the cost by 3 which makes our total $63.45. Of course, you may need to add some extra on there if the decorations are fancy. This is where your work per hour price comes in. Let’s say it’s another 2 hours at $12 per hour. Now your total is $87.45.
To use this for a carved cake you price out all the cake you bake to build the structure and add the hours for the decorations. Easy peasy. Like I said, the more you calculate cake prices this way the easier it gets. Bakery Butler will have some of this functionality built in so you will get rough estimates automatically!
So I Can Figure Out Cake Prices. Now What?
In order to put these calculating skills to work you need two things: targeted traffic and online sales. Be sure to check out some of our other articles and learn SEO tips for increasing traffic and how to increase online sales.
Also, be sure to sign up for your FREE trial of Bakery Butler. That’s right! You can get access to all the current features of Bakery Butler for 30 days for absolutely FREE.
