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This seems backwards. The flour (say 500 grams) for a basic loaf of bread should cost something like 50 cents, looking at U.S. prices. Water, yeast and salt a

This seems backwards. The flour (say 500 grams) for a basic loaf of bread should cost something like 50 cents, looking at U.S. prices. Water, yeast and salt a fraction of a cent each. You should be able to charge at least $3 for the resulting loaf. If you know what you're doing and are in the right area, maybe as much as $6? 6-12x markup over ingredient cost. The same bread ingredients would make the dough for a rather large pepperoni pizza, which you could maybe charge $20 for? A very conservative (I think) $2.50 of cheese and $1 of pepperoni would leave you at a 5x markup. Never mind tomato sauce, or the extra labour involved.

CrazyStat 5y ago
The ingredients are not the only cost. Labor (time), rent, etc. all go into margin. A loaf of bread bakes for 30-60 minutes. A pizza bakes for 3-10 minutes, so you can bake a lot more pizzas than bread loaves in a day. You can probably also sell more pizzas than bread loaves in a day.
- dymk 5y ago
  Could a bread oven pack more efficiently than a pizza oven? It seems easier to put a bunch of rectangular prisms in a space compared to largeish disks
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    If you're baking rectangular prisms you're competing with $2 grocery store bread. To have a chance as an independent baker you need to go after the more expensive "artisan" type breads which are typically oblong or round (boules) and not baked in a pan.
    - phonypc 5y ago
      There's plenty of "artisan" sandwich loaf, baked-in-a-pan bread out there.
- phonypc 5y ago
  Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Anyway, I contend that pizza is more labour intensive than bread. You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza. No doubt that in some circumstances, pizza is a more viable business model than bread. I'm just skeptical that the margin on a pizza sale is typically better than bread.
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    >Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Ingredients were mentioned as classifications for product types. >You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza. Not really. Maybe 2-3 decent sized loaves in the footprint of one large pizza, but you can also bake pizzas in much less vertical space, so you can have double the baking surface footprint for pizzas in the same oven volume.
    - phonypc 5y ago
      In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation means you can't shrink the vertical space as much as you might like to. Anyway, it seems to me the important metric in this regard would be how many items per unit time a baker can effectively manage. Pizza requires some amount of attention more or less constantly. I doubt one baker can manage more than 5 at time, even if the oven could fit many more. Meanwhile that same baker can set a timer on an oven containing many dozens of bread loaves and forget about them until they're done.
      - CrazyStat 5y ago
        You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or similar short flat-top breads. Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at least double the required oven volume), gives you similar revenue, and is much harder to sell.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
It may seem backwards, but it is forwards: Total ingredient cost for a $3 loaf is about $0.75. Adding in cracked grains or seeds brings it to c. $1.50 for a $5-6 loaf. Total ingredient cost for a $20 pizza is about $3. This is for a "good" pizza. A Pizza Hut-grade pizza is probably $1.50-$2.00 in ingredients and sells for $9-10. Now: bakeries do not sell every loaf of bread they bake. Quite a bit of bread goes stale, gets made into breadcrumbs, thrown out, sold at discount, donated to food pantries. Pizza has much less spoilage because of the process: most ingredients, including the dough, are refrigerated. The dough needs 48h (could be as short as 24h) to ferment, but then stays good in the fridge for days. As long as you have a big enough fridge, the inventory problem is pretty simple to manage. Cured meats (sausage, pepperoni) have a long shelf life with refrigeration, as does cheese. Vegetables also last for days. The end result is that (albeit with some added costs from refrigeration) you're able to make the products on-demand as the orders come in. With bread, the product must be prepared well in advance and there's more waste. A well-run pizzeria is pretty lean on labor, too. Plenty of pizzerias get by profitably with one or two men in the kitchen and one man at the counter. But if you don't believe me, believe the market: most bread is produced industrially, sealed in plastic, and shipped to retailers on trucks. Small profitable pizzerias are ubiquitous.
- phonypc 5y ago
  I'd love to see how one comes to these number. $0.75 is either very expensive flour, or a very large loaf sold too cheaply. Adding seeds (at what, 5-10% of the weight of the flour?) to a loaf doubles the ingredient cost? Glancing at bulk commercial prices, sesame seeds added at (the unrealistically high) 20% of a loaf made with 500g flour should be about $0.29. Poppy seeds almost gets you there if you use the unusually high 2018 price, at $0.65. $3 of bulk part-skim mozzarella is generously something like 250g worth. That's skimpy for a large pizza. The rest of the ingredients for this "good" pizza are free? A bakery that's throwing out too much is baking too much, or there's no market for their bread. That's nothing to do with the margin on bread being thin. Small profitable bakeries are ubiquitous where there's a market for them. See: France.
  - i_am_proteus 5y ago

CrazyStat 5y ago

The ingredients are not the only cost. Labor (time), rent, etc. all go into margin. A loaf of bread bakes for 30-60 minutes. A pizza bakes for 3-10 minutes, so you can bake a lot more pizzas than bread loaves in a day. You can probably also sell more pizzas than bread loaves in a day.

dymk 5y ago
Could a bread oven pack more efficiently than a pizza oven? It seems easier to put a bunch of rectangular prisms in a space compared to largeish disks
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  If you're baking rectangular prisms you're competing with $2 grocery store bread. To have a chance as an independent baker you need to go after the more expensive "artisan" type breads which are typically oblong or round (boules) and not baked in a pan.
  - phonypc 5y ago
    There's plenty of "artisan" sandwich loaf, baked-in-a-pan bread out there.
phonypc 5y ago
Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Anyway, I contend that pizza is more labour intensive than bread. You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza. No doubt that in some circumstances, pizza is a more viable business model than bread. I'm just skeptical that the margin on a pizza sale is typically better than bread.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  >Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Ingredients were mentioned as classifications for product types. >You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza. Not really. Maybe 2-3 decent sized loaves in the footprint of one large pizza, but you can also bake pizzas in much less vertical space, so you can have double the baking surface footprint for pizzas in the same oven volume.
  - phonypc 5y ago
    In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation means you can't shrink the vertical space as much as you might like to. Anyway, it seems to me the important metric in this regard would be how many items per unit time a baker can effectively manage. Pizza requires some amount of attention more or less constantly. I doubt one baker can manage more than 5 at time, even if the oven could fit many more. Meanwhile that same baker can set a timer on an oven containing many dozens of bread loaves and forget about them until they're done.
    - CrazyStat 5y ago
      You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or similar short flat-top breads. Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at least double the required oven volume), gives you similar revenue, and is much harder to sell.

i_am_proteus 5y ago

It may seem backwards, but it is forwards: Total ingredient cost for a $3 loaf is about $0.75. Adding in cracked grains or seeds brings it to c. $1.50 for a $5-6 loaf. Total ingredient cost for a $20 pizza is about $3. This is for a "good" pizza. A Pizza Hut-grade pizza is probably $1.50-$2.00 in ingredients and sells for $9-10. Now: bakeries do not sell every loaf of bread they bake. Quite a bit of bread goes stale, gets made into breadcrumbs, thrown out, sold at discount, donated to food pantries. Pizza has much less spoilage because of the process: most ingredients, including the dough, are refrigerated. The dough needs 48h (could be as short as 24h) to ferment, but then stays good in the fridge for days. As long as you have a big enough fridge, the inventory problem is pretty simple to manage. Cured meats (sausage, pepperoni) have a long shelf life with refrigeration, as does cheese. Vegetables also last for days. The end result is that (albeit with some added costs from refrigeration) you're able to make the products on-demand as the orders come in. With bread, the product must be prepared well in advance and there's more waste. A well-run pizzeria is pretty lean on labor, too. Plenty of pizzerias get by profitably with one or two men in the kitchen and one man at the counter. But if you don't believe me, believe the market: most bread is produced industrially, sealed in plastic, and shipped to retailers on trucks. Small profitable pizzerias are ubiquitous.

phonypc 5y ago
I'd love to see how one comes to these number. $0.75 is either very expensive flour, or a very large loaf sold too cheaply. Adding seeds (at what, 5-10% of the weight of the flour?) to a loaf doubles the ingredient cost? Glancing at bulk commercial prices, sesame seeds added at (the unrealistically high) 20% of a loaf made with 500g flour should be about $0.29. Poppy seeds almost gets you there if you use the unusually high 2018 price, at $0.65. $3 of bulk part-skim mozzarella is generously something like 250g worth. That's skimpy for a large pizza. The rest of the ingredients for this "good" pizza are free? A bakery that's throwing out too much is baking too much, or there's no market for their bread. That's nothing to do with the margin on bread being thin. Small profitable bakeries are ubiquitous where there's a market for them. See: France.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago