Set a retail price from your cost and target margin — with a sanity check against competitor pricing.
Target price
$8.33
Margin per unit
$3.33
Cost-plus pricing starts from what you spend and works forward to the price you need to hit your target margin. Add shipping and handling to the cost side, not as a post-hoc surcharge — it is real cost per unit.
The competitor field is a sanity check, not the formula. If your cost-based price sits 30% above market, either your costs are too high or your margin target is unrealistic for this category.
price = (unit_cost + shipping) ÷ (1 − margin_pct)
margin_$ = price − (unit_cost + shipping)
Wholesale Markup
Price wholesale and retail in lockstep — keystone, MAP-friendly, and key-two markups with gross profit checks.
Profit Margin
Gross margin, net margin, and markup — convert between them cleanly so you do not mix up 40% margin and 40% markup.
Break-Even Analysis
Fixed costs, variable cost per unit, and price — see the break-even unit count and revenue.
Enter your unit cost (raw materials, packaging, labor allocated per unit), inbound freight or fulfillment cost, and a target margin percentage. The calculator divides cost by (1 minus margin) to give the retail price that hits your margin target. Note that this is margin math, not markup math — a 40% margin means $40 of every $100 sale stays after cost, which corresponds to a 67% markup on cost. The output also shows gross profit per unit and total dollars covered.
Pricing by feel is the fastest way for a small food business to run unprofitably for a year before noticing. Cost-plus is the simplest defensible method: write down your real cost, choose a margin you need to operate, and let the formula give you the price. It does not optimize for what the market will bear — that is a separate question — but it tells you the floor below which you should not sell. Producers who launch on brothh without running this number first regularly under-price their first season and have to raise prices on returning customers, which is the worst sequence to be in.
Margin and markup are different. The formula uses gross margin (gp ÷ price). For commodity food items 20-30% margin is typical at wholesale; specialty and direct-to-consumer often run 50-70%. Cost should include all variable costs per unit; allocate fixed overhead separately via Break-Even or Profit Margin. Shipping should be your real per-unit cost, including box and label, not just the carrier rate. Re-test pricing when costs move more than 5% — small shifts compound when margin is tight.