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How to determine price?

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Soyala_Amaya

Soyala_Amaya

NewBee
Registered Member
Mar 21, 2011
991
6
0
Missouri
How do you figure the price of a bottle?

I.E. I used $100 worth of supplies to make 6.5 gallons of product, how much do I have in/charge for a 500 ml beer bottle vs a 22 oz bottle?

Is there a formula? I.E. 3 times the amount I have in each bottle? It'd be around 36 bucks for a six pack!
 
That's a pretty complex topic. There is no specific formula. Cost accounting itself just to determine cost per unit can be very complex. It's an entire field of specialty in the world of accounting. I took several graduate level courses in it and I'm still far from being and expert.

The price you would charge is determined by the market and has nothing to do with your costs. You need to determine what the market will bear for a given product, and then figure out if you can produce it for a profit.

That's an overly simplistic answer to your question, but you could easily fill a book answering it.
 
Sigh, I was worried that might be the answer. I gave some bottles in baskets to a chairty auction and they want a number to put on the baskets. I have receipts for everything I bought for the baskets, but no clue what to put on the bottles of mead.
 
I agree with CG. Use the existing Mead market as a guide. The stuff from B Nektar, Rabbit's Foot, Redstone, etc seems to sell in the $15 - $30 range.
 
Thank you! Seems like a very good idea to me (and I get to do some research online for delicious things, hee hee hee)
 
My math puts a 500mL bottle at ~$2.00, and a 22oz bottle at ~$2.60, assuming it cost $100 for the ingredients in a 6.5 gallon batch. A 500mL bottle is about 16.9oz, if that helps.

Of course, this doesn't include cost of equipment (bottles, corks, sanitizer, etc), the opportunity cost of aging said mead (ie taking up precious carboy space), your labor costs, nor the idea of turning a profit...just how much each bottle works out to being at the cost of the ingredients inside each one.

I'd definitely say going by the prices of other commercial products out there is the best bet.
 
if you figure the cost of bottles now a days, your looking at $2 per bottle (based on $24 per 12 without shipping), add in another $.10 for a cork, then your looking at label costs. mine is about $.50 a label.

so with the above figure your looking at what, $5 per just in costs? that's not counting the following questions:
1) how much is your time worth and how much time do you have in that particular batch?
2) how much was your initial equipment? (ie: carboys, airlocks, stoppers, sanatizing equipment, mixing equipment, corker, etc)

It's not hard to get to the $15 mark just on cost alone. What I would do is figure out approximately how many gallons you make per year, then divide that by the number of bottles you project filling from those gallons. Add up all your costs and divide by the projected volume number. That will figure in your mark up costs your start up equipment.

Then it's all about how much profit you want to make. If i were to ever sell mead (which i don't and don't have any immediate plans to do) my time is worth at least a 60% margin. So if my costs were (just an example) $15, i'd add another $9 per bottle on to that for a total of $24.

after that you get into the legalities. how much did your tax stamp cost you? how much are your local taxes? etc...
 
Trust me, I'm not planning on trying to go commercial either! I just needed SOME number to give to my auction babe. Since it's a charity auction, in the online catalog she puts a 'retail value' next to each thing. I told her roughly 18 for each of the four packs of 500 ml, and 20 for the two 22 ounces. It seemed like an ok number with being extravagant to me. Something I'd actually pay, yknow?

I find it odd that even though you really get more ml in a 6 pack than in two wine bottles, almost invariably any kind of six pack is cheaper. Admittedly, most of that was beer, but still...they have costs too, and wheat isn't really that cheap. Just an observation as I looked over some sites for this.
 
Can't you just find a bottle of mead in your local liquor/wine shop, and use that as a reference?
 
...and I don't think I've seen mead in the LCBO since they stopped selling Moniack... not as simple a solution as it seems on the surface, for some of us...
 
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