How to price sourdough bread: cost per loaf, batch size and a worked price in five currencies

Price a sourdough loaf from its cost per loaf, not from the bakery down the road: flour (counting the starter you feed and throw away), salt, oven energy, the bag and label, and your hours divided by the loaves in the batch, plus a share of overhead, then divide by one minus your margin. Flour is the small line. At a 24-loaf bake, an 800 g country loaf costs about US$7 to make in the US once your time is paid, and about US$11.90 is the price at a 40% margin. Bake 48 instead of 24 and the cost per loaf falls by about 30%, because the hours are shared.

What goes into one loaf

Take an 800 g baked country loaf from a 900 g dough: 450 g of flour, 340 g of water, 10 g of salt and 100 g of levain (50 g flour, 50 g water). Add 50 g for the starter you feed and discard to keep the culture going, and the loaf carries 550 g of flour. Leaving the discard out understates flour by about a tenth.

• Flour. The only ingredient line that matters much. Price it from your last invoice per kg, including freight.
• Water and salt. Water is close to nothing; 10 g of salt is a few cents.
• Oven energy. Oven power in kW, times hours on (preheat plus bake), times your price per kWh, divided by the loaves per load. A deck or domestic oven that holds only four loaves per load costs far more per loaf than one that holds twenty.
• Packaging. Paper bag and label, or nothing for loaves going to a cafe in a crate.
• Labour. Feeding, mixing, folds, dividing, shaping, loading, baking, cooling, bagging and cleaning, across the whole batch. Most of a sourdough schedule is waiting; count the hands-on time and the time you cannot leave.
• Overhead. Rent or the share of home costs, insurance, banneton and equipment wear, card fees. A flat 12% of materials plus labour is a reasonable start, the same as in the cake pricing calculator.

Cost per loaf in five currencies

A 24-loaf bake taking 4.8 hands-on hours, which is 0.2 hours per loaf. Flour is 550 g per loaf at each country's official average retail flour price. Salt (0.05), energy (0.35) and packaging (0.30) are example inputs in local currency. Hourly rates are the same example rates used across our pricing guides. Price is shown at a 40% margin.

Flour prices: US Bureau of Labor Statistics city average for white all-purpose flour, August 2026 (US$0.548 per lb); ONS shopping prices for self-raising flour, August 2026 (£1.01 for 1.5 kg, the only flour in the ONS series); Statistics Canada table 18-10-0245-01, wheat flour, July 2026 (C$5.36 for 2.5 kg); Stats NZ selected price indexes, white flour, August 2026 (NZ$2.06 for 1.5 kg). Australia has no current official average retail price series for flour, so A$1.60 per kg is an example; use your own invoice.

These are supermarket prices for household bags. Bread flour costs more than plain or all-purpose, and a 12.5 kg or 25 kg sack from a mill or wholesaler usually costs less per kg. Either way, the table shows how little it matters: doubling the flour price adds US$0.66 to the US cost and 37p to the UK cost, against US$5.00 and £3.60 of labour. Labour is about 70% of the cost in every column.

Batch size moves the price more than flour does

Hands-on time does not scale with loaves. Feeding, mixing and cleaning take about as long for 10 loaves as for 30; only shaping, loading and bagging grow with the count. The same Australian loaf at three batch sizes:

Those hours are examples; time your own bake once, start to clean bench. The pattern holds anyway. At 10 loaves a bake you cannot charge what the loaf costs, and at 48 you can sell near the usual artisan shelf price and still pay yourself. If your costed price is well above what loaves sell for locally, the fix is more loaves per bake, or fewer bakes with more in each, before it is a cheaper flour.

Retail, wholesale and market prices

Retail is the formula above: cost per loaf at your real batch size, plus your margin. Check it against local shelf prices for a comparable loaf, and price specials (seeded, olive, fruit and spice) from their own recipe cost rather than a flat dollar on top.

Wholesale to a cafe is usually 50 to 70% of your retail price, so the cafe can mark it up; the reasoning is in wholesale pricing, price lists and terms. Wholesale loaves only work at batch sizes where cost per loaf sits well below half your retail price, and the delivery has to be covered by a minimum order. Wholesale bread pricing for cafes works through the margins.

Markets sell at retail but carry their own costs: the stall fee, your day at the stall and the loaves that come home. Divide the stall fee by the loaves you expect to sell to see what it adds per loaf; a stall fee of 60 spread across 60 loaves adds 1 to each loaf, in any currency. See how to run a market stall bakery.

Costing from your own invoices

ibakepro, bakery management software for bakeries of every size including sourdough micro-bakeries, works out cost per loaf from your recipe and the flour, salt and bags you bought, and recosts every product when a supplier's sack price changes. See recipe costing, and for raising prices when flour moves, repricing when ingredient costs move.