bbq sauce cost

Seems to me that Sam's has Cattleman's for $7 +/gal and lots of folks doctor it .

vincenzo,
to get a cost for your sauce is somewhat tedious but here goes.
take your recipe and do an individual cost for each item. where the fun begins is many spices are 1/4 tsp which means you will have to know the exact number of 1/4 tsp per the bottle of spice. so empty the bottle and start counting (told you this was fun!!) to get a true cost you will have to do this with every item. what i did was make a master list by brand, size of container and price and then developed the unit cost of each item. i have a zerox copy of this when i go shopping and to make my life ez if i buy the product on sale (cheaper than my master price) i dont sweat it, but if the cost is higher i just work out a percentage of change. drives my wife nuts but what the heck doing this satisfies what i learned running an engineering department before becoming a chef and to me it is time well spent.
hope this helped you
jack
2 Greyhounds....SMOKIN!!!!

I did pretty much what presionchef313 (by the way...hey 2 Greyhounds and thanks for your incouragement...may be getting back into business, check my journal!) did, you just have to sit down one time and break all your ingredients down and see what you have. Then you can use that particular item to add to the costs of other items which you had broken down too!

If you have Excel or some other spread sheet software that can read an .xls file you can click on my links on my web site and you're spread sheet software should automatically load and comeup with my files. If you'll go to my web site using the link at the bottom of this post, then go the the bbq page (click on the Cap'n Pete's Olde Tyme Southern BBQ sign) then click on November 2003 and then click on "spreadsheet" in the Nov 12th entry and other links that are spread sheets you'll see how after you get that cost that you can easily make entries and changes when costs change. My bbq sauce cost is $.0587 per ounce, hence, $7.5136 per gallon.

If you don't know how to use spread sheets you can do a search on the web for basic tutorials, as I did!

I have created a partial spreadsheet of my bbq sauce with some ingredients left out so you can get an idea of what you may like to try to do. Try this link.

Any other queries you may have, if this helps, I'll be glad to try to answer.

man pete that is great news. peggy and i have been hoping things would turn around for you and i can't think of anything much better than the health inspector going to the same church as your friend. keep your head up and if it helps bbq sauce was what opened this whole thing for me and now we are betting 30k that we can make a go of it. we read your journal and it helps us avoid the mine field. by the way the trailer tech trailer with the sm150 and fec100 installed is due to be done july 10th.
best wishes,jack and peggy percifield
2 greyhounds....SMOKIN!!!!

Cap'n,

Good to see you back on here. Hope that everything turns out ok for you. Best of luck in you new venture/adventure...

PS let me know when you get your sauce available again. I would love to give it a try.

Here is a great conversion program to convert any type of measurements.

http://www.savardsoftware.com/masterconverter/

give it a try sure helps me out.

vincenzo,
What prisonchef didn't tell you is that he also weighs everything. Yes, it does drive me nuts, but his sauce is really good. Of course, he has to have a sweet, spicy, and hot sauce. And he wants to get one more. I guess 4 is his lucky number. I think the hot one is probably the most expensive, that's our Moose Kick, named after our male greyhound. But if you limit the size of the serving, maybe it isn't too bad. I'm thinking putting it into small cups. Ask the people if they'd like sweet, spicy or hot. I don't like the idea of the squeeze bottles out for them to use, because I picture everything disappearing. Maybe a small cup might not be enough and they'd come back for more, then I can sell them something else, lol.

Wow, I guess the days of breaking down food costs on the back of a cocktail napkin by hand are gone. Welcome to the computer age. Two other alternatives to hand counting various ingredients. 1) I have made my Sysco rep find out from the manufacturer what their product weighs for a given volume i.e. fluid ounce. You can then extrapolate out to find out the weight for smaller amounts. Accuracy is dependent on how many decimal places the manufacturer weighed their product to. 2) One of my cooks told me about a new food cost method that involved guesstimating on "misc" items that are hard to weigh because they are so light. I was very skeptical so I did not pursue it further, but she swore that it worked and saved a bunch of time. Perhaps someone who has some recent education could shed some light on the method.

Mark,
being a gambling man I would give her 20 bucks if I were you just to find out what her method is What the heck if it works 20 is an ok investment and if it didn't well welcome to the club that all us Smarty Jones horse fans are in lol
jack