Most sourdough bakers underprice their bread. Not by a little — by £3 to £5 per loaf. The reason is almost always the same: they calculate ingredient costs, double or triple them, and call that a price. It feels logical. It's wrong.
Ingredients are the smallest part of making sourdough. Labour is the biggest. Once you add electricity, packaging, and a share of your overhead, a loaf that cost you "£2 in flour" actually costs closer to £7 or £8 to produce properly. If you're selling at £6, you're losing money on every sale.
This guide walks through every real cost in a sourdough loaf and shows you how to set a price that covers them all.
This is the part most bakers get right, though even here there are things commonly missed. A standard 900g sourdough loaf uses roughly:
Total ingredients for a standard white sourdough: £1.00–£2.50 depending on flour quality. For heritage grain or organic flour, this climbs to £3.50–£5.00.
A domestic oven running at 230°C for 45–50 minutes uses roughly 0.8–1.0 kWh. At current UK energy prices of approximately 24p per kWh, that's around 20–24p per bake cycle. If you bake two loaves at once, that drops to 10–12p per loaf. Steam generation, preheating a Dutch oven, and proving in a warm oven all add to this.
It's a small number but it's real, and over hundreds of loaves it adds up.
This is where most bakers lose money without realising it. Sourdough involves active time across multiple sessions:
That's 85–110 minutes of active time per batch, not including the passive hours of fermentation. If you bake two loaves, your active time per loaf is 40–55 minutes.
At the UK national living wage of £12.21/hr, that's £8–£11 per loaf in labour alone. If you value your time at a skilled rate, it's higher.
This is why the "3× ingredients" pricing rule destroys sourdough businesses. Tripling £1.50 in flour gives you £4.50 — and you've effectively paid yourself about £3 an hour.
Paper bags, stickers, tissue paper, and labels quickly add £0.30–£0.80 per loaf. If you sell at markets, add a share of pitch fees, travel, and stall equipment depreciation. For home-based sales, factor in a portion of your broadband, phone, and any baking equipment you've bought.
A reasonable overhead allocation for a small home baker is £0.50–£1.50 per loaf.
| Cost Element | Standard White | Organic/Heritage |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredients | £1.20–£1.80 | £3.00–£5.00 |
| Energy | £0.12–£0.24 | £0.12–£0.24 |
| Labour (45 mins active) | £9.15 | £9.15 |
| Packaging | £0.40–£0.60 | £0.60–£0.80 |
| Overhead share | £0.75 | £0.75 |
| Total cost | £11.60–£12.50 | £13.60–£15.90 |
To make a 30% profit margin on a standard white sourdough, you need to charge around £16–£18. For organic or heritage grain loaves, £19–£23.
If those numbers feel high, consider: premium sourdough at farmers' markets and independent delis routinely sells for £7–£12 in supermarkets and £12–£18 from specialist bakers. Buyers who seek out artisan sourdough understand and accept artisan pricing. The buyers who balk at £15 for a hand-shaped organic heritage grain sourdough are not your customers.
The most common pricing mistakes:
The figures above are benchmarks. Your actual cost depends on your specific flour, your oven, your hourly rate, and your batch size. The only way to get your real number is to run the maths for your actual recipe.
If you want to do this properly without building a spreadsheet from scratch, our Sourdough Profit Calculator walks through every cost element — ingredients by weight, electricity per bake, labour at your chosen hourly rate, packaging, and overhead — and gives you a true cost per loaf and a suggested selling price at whatever margin you set.
Enter your actual ingredients, energy costs, time, and packaging. Get your true cost per loaf and a suggested selling price instantly. Works offline, no subscription.
See the Calculator — £15 →Once you know your real cost, pricing becomes straightforward. Set a margin you're comfortable with — 30–40% is typical for artisan food products — and that's your price. If the market won't bear it, the answer isn't to undercharge: it's to find the right market, increase batch size to reduce per-loaf cost, or adjust your recipe to improve margins.
Your bread is worth what it costs to make it properly, plus a fair return for your skill. Start there.