Price a tiffin or a cake so it pays
Cost a dish down to the gas and the box, and set a price that pays you for your time.
6 min read
Most home food businesses price by feel: what the bakery down the road charges, what friends say sounds fair, a round number. Then, after a busy month, there is less money left than expected — sometimes none. The cause is almost always the same: the price only covered the ingredients, and everything else came out of the cook's own pocket and time.
This lesson costs one dish properly. If you are already selling, do it for your three best sellers. If you are about to start, do it before you announce a single price — changing a price later is harder than setting it right.
Cost one unit, down to the box
Take one tiffin, one cake, one jar. Add up everything that goes into it:
| What it uses | How to work it out |
|---|---|
| Ingredients | Price of each, divided by how many units one pack makes |
| Gas or electricity | Roughly: the extra on your bill divided by units made that month |
| Packaging | Box, container, foil, bag, label, sticker |
| Delivery | Your fuel or the delivery fee, per order |
| Payment and app charges | Anything the payment method or app takes from the order |
| Wastage | Unsold or spoilt food, spread over what you did sell |
A made-up example. One veg tiffin: ingredients ₹48, gas ₹6, container and bag ₹12, delivery ₹10, wastage ₹4. The tiffin costs ₹80 before anything is paid for your time. A ₹90 price leaves ₹10.
Then pay yourself
Your time is a real cost, even if no one is paying it yet. Write down how many hours a day the business takes — shopping, cooking, packing, delivering, answering messages, cleaning up — and decide what an hour of that is worth to you. Divide it across the orders.
In the made-up example, if you spend 5 hours a day for 20 tiffins and want ₹150 an hour, that is ₹750 a day, or ₹37.50 a tiffin. Now the honest cost is about ₹118 — and a ₹90 price is paying you less than nothing for some of your hours.
The commonest mistake in home food is leaving your own time out of the price because "it is from home". Then growth makes it worse: more orders, more hours, the same thin margin.
Set the price, then check it
Price = cost per unit + your time + what is left over for the business (new equipment, a bad week, growth).
Then check it against reality:
- What do customers pay now for something similar — another home cook, a mess, a bakery? Not to copy it, but to know where you sit.
- What makes yours worth more? Home-style, a dish nobody else makes, punctual delivery, made to order. Say so in how you describe it.
- Would ten real customers pay it? Try it. If they will, you were probably too cheap before.
Ways to make the sum work
If the price you need is more than people will pay, change the order rather than working for nothing:
- Minimum order or batch days. Cakes on order only, pickles in batches — less waste, less gas per unit.
- Monthly tiffin plans paid in advance: steady demand, easier buying, cash before you cook.
- Delivery charge or pickup area. Delivery to far addresses can eat a whole order's margin.
- A smaller menu. Fewer dishes means fewer ingredients sitting unused.
- Bulk buying of what you use every day, once you know your volumes.
If you sell through a delivery app
The app's charges come out of the order. Find the current charges on the app's own seller terms for your area and category, add them to the costing table, and work out the price you need there separately. Many home cooks keep a slightly different price on the app, where that is allowed.
Redo it every quarter
Ingredient and gas prices move. Once a quarter, redo the table for your three best sellers. If the margin has shrunk, raise prices a little — small, regular increases are easier on customers than a sudden jump.
Ask the tool below to look at your own food business — your dishes, costs and city — and it will help you check whether the price works and who is likely to pay it.