Charging per serving: which serving size do I use???
I am new to the cake business. I have started baking out of my own kitchen and work solely with fondant covered cakes. I have decided to start pricing my cakes by the number of servings. Ex: $4 per serving for fondant covered cake. My question is that I keep seeing two different serving sizes per cake… the birthday party size and the wedding serving size. If someone wants a two tiered cake for a birthday do I have to charge less because those slices are larger? It seems crazy to think that, but how do I tell a customer that even though she is only having 15 people I am charging for more servings? The full story, a customer wants a tiered cake for 15 people. So, I am going to do an 8" and 6" tiered cake. This technically has 30 servings which would be $120 for the cake. However, I’ve seen listings that show less servings for birthday cakes (which is what this is for). But, I don’t want to have two different prices for my cakes just because one is for birthdays and one is for weddings. Help?!
5 Comments
When you calculated the 30 servings for the 2 tier cake which serving size did you use?
When I try to figure out what size cakes I need to make to accommodate the requested servings I always use the party size not the wedding. This way you are sure there is enough cake no matter how they cut it. That being said if I was to charge per serving I would be use the one larger party size.
You may just have to explain to the customer that if she wants a tiered cake it feeds way more than 15 people. Hopefully they will understand and you have to still do double the work and will not cringe at the price tag.
The 30 servings I calculated was using a wedding cake serving guide. She wants the two tiers of 8" and 6" even though she is only serving 15 people. I don’t want to end up having two prices for the same size cake… Such as a price for party servings and a price for wedding servings. I think I may try a different pricing approach and charge set price for each size, charge a price to tier them, and a price for add on decorations. Pricing them is harder than making them!!!
Why do you charge per serving anyway, just set a starting price for 1 tier, 2, 3 etc cakes and increase it according to the difficulty of design and amount of work, then just tell people approximate number of servings they will get. That’s how I price my cakes and never had a problem. It’s their problem how many people they want to feed, if they want a 2 tier cake – they pay for 2 tiers. People pay for your time spent on the cake , ingredients are not expensive, so the price must depend on the design and time needed to accomplish. You are an artist not a baker if you make custom decorated cakes and you must charge accordingly. I hope this is helpful to you :)
I charge by the wedding slice, regardless of cake type. I use the industry standard cutting guides. So I go by the Wilton slice guide. If someone is asking for a 6" round cake for a small party, they will get 8 generous servings, if it’s a wedding they will get 12 servings out of the 6" round. Regardless of party type, I will charge $3.00 per serving x 12 = $36.00, this is what I sell my simple, buttercream 6" round cake for. If they want fondant or fancy decorations the price goes up from there.
You don’t need to have 2 pricing formulas, just one.
Teri, Ontario, Canada http://www.TeriLovesCake.ca
Thank you everyone. You really helped me. I have decided to go with set prices for fondant covered cakes (that’s really all i work with right now) and then charge for additional decorations and figures.
Just a question for MsGF: That’s what I was originally thinking of doing… charging by the wedding serving guidline. Let me ask you how you discuss your pricing though. Since you know you will sell your 6" buttercream for $36, do you tell your customers that it is $3.00 per serving and that it how many you get with the 6" cake, or do you just tell them a 6" cake is $36 and not discuss your breakdown of cost per serving? Thanks!
