GUIDE

How to calculate cost per gram for freeze dried food

Every pricing decision in a freeze drying business rests on one number: what a finished gram cost to make. Not what a pound of strawberries cost, and not what a run cost. A gram of the thing you are actually selling. Most operators have a feel for it and very few have the number, because it takes three inputs that live in three different places and a yield that changes with every product.

The three inputs

The cost of a run is the sum of three things, and all of them are known by the time the dryer finishes.

1. Raw product. What you paid for what went onto the trays. If a run holds more than one product, keep the cost per tray rather than per run, so a mixed run can still be split honestly later.
2. Prep labour. The time spent washing, slicing, and loading, at an hourly rate. Your own time counts. If you would not do it for free, it is not free.
3. Power. The machine's draw in kilowatts, times your electricity price per kilowatt-hour, times the hours the run actually took. A run that goes 36 hours instead of 30 costs 20% more to power, which is why the clock matters.

Add them up, then divide by the net dry weight in grams: what came off the trays, minus the trays and mats themselves. That is cost per gram.

A worked example

One medium Harvest Right run of sliced strawberries. The numbers are ordinary, and you should swap in your own.

After hulling, 4,800 g of fruit went on the trays. Strawberries are about 91% water, so 432 g came off, a yield of 9%. The cost per gram is $46.79 divided by 432 g, which is $0.108, call it 11 cents a gram.

That number is what pricing is built on. A 25 g bag costs $2.71 to fill. At a $6.00 shelf price, the bag clears $3.29 before packaging, and now you know whether that is enough. Without the number, you are guessing whether the price is right, and the guess is usually on the low side because the pound price of fruit is the only figure in view.

What the pound price hides

Strawberries at $2.50 a pound feel cheap. Divided by a 9% yield, that same fruit costs $27.78 a pound dry, before anyone has lifted a knife. Yield is the multiplier on everything, which is why a product with a 30% yield can cost more per pound wet and far less per gram finished. Comparing products on the wet price alone will steer you toward the wrong ones.

The two costs that get left out

Your own labour. An owner's 45 minutes of slicing is real time that could have gone anywhere else, and a product that only makes money when that time is free is a product that stops making money the moment you hire someone.

Run time. Power is the smallest of the three inputs on most runs, but it is the one that varies most between products, because a wet, dense load takes longer than a light one. Measuring the run from start to finish, rather than assuming a fixed 36 hours, is what makes the comparison between products fair. It is also the number that tells you a machine is drifting, when the same product starts taking longer than it used to.

Keeping the number current

A spreadsheet can do all of this once. It is the second run, the second product on the same rack, and the second machine that break it. The formula has to be dragged down a column, the wattage lives on a different tab from the run time, and the moment a mixed run needs splitting the whole thing becomes an afternoon's work that nobody does.

FreezeDry HQ records the three inputs where they occur, the raw cost on the prep sheet, the prep time when the sheet is filled, and the run time from the batch clock, and builds cost per gram from them for every run, on every plan. If you want per-product yield on a mixed run as well, the companion guide, why yield should be measured per product, not per batch, shows the split.

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