Pricing Analysis

This is the updated pricing breakdown for making a gf flour, from our earlier Flour Power Blog, based on our web prices as of August 26th 2008.  We update this page regularly to reflect actual market prices of bulk flours/starches, so please make sure to come back
here often.



Use this to help decide when it will be more cost effective to make your own
cup for cup flour or buy our brand online. Remember to substitute your own
local prices for quantities in when doing a cost analysis!



Depending on your geographic location, the prices for commodities may
differ, especially in remote or international locations, so you'll need
to input your own pricing to determine whether this is accurate for
where you live. This is an accurate estimate for those in the northeast
United States, with access to bulk food stores.


Pricing for both figures
(homemade versus commercial) is accurate as of August 26th 2008, based on commodity pricing here. This is based on online retail pricing. Sales will obviously alter the total cost per pound of flour. In areas where this flour is available in stores, you will need to compare the cost of the on-shelf product to find the accurate price per pound. This will vary by unit size, with bulk flour pricing the cheapest.



Standard "cup for cup" Flour Mix (homemade)
This mix is a standard cup for cup mix, based off the the food science on our Flour Power blog. It works very well, for those looking to make their own mix.



4 c white rice flour (1.15) ($1.15 per pound)



1 c tapioca flour (.31) ($1.24 per pound)



1c potato starch (.27) ($1.10 per pound)



1/4 c potato flour (.25) ($4.03 per pound)



1/4 c xanthan gum (1.17) ($18.72 per pound)





Using this formula...................

It's going to cost you about $2.10 per pound to make flour,
if you are buying from a bulk food discount store, for a total cost of $3.15 for the recipe above .  If you are buying
flour from another kind of store (supermarket, for example) you should
increase the cost of this to roughly $6.30 per pound.



You'll need to add extra cost if you're adding in or subbing in things
like brown rice flour ($1.80 per pound), teff ($5.00 per pound) or sorghum flour ($5.00 per pound),
gelatin ($6.45 per pound), pectin($4.00 per pound), or any other additional ingredients.

You'll also need
to factor in gas. Usually this works out to between .13 and .40 per mile
- remember to double it for the trip up and back - so if you're driving
12 miles away, the total trip is 24 miles.

Divide the cost of a gallon
of gas by the miles per gallon your vehicle gets, then multiply it by
the total riving distance to get your real cost in gas for driving to the store.

For instance: if your car gets 18 miles to the
gallon (the average in this area), and gas in your area is 4.00 per gallon, the cost of driving in gas is $.22 per mile.

If your bulk food store is 20 miles away (the average for homes in this area), the total distance would be 40 miles.

The real
cost in gas in this scenario is $8.80.

You could add wear and tear (federal
calculations for W-A-T is roughly .48 per mile), driving time and mixing time, but we don't think that's entirely necessary.


To find out what the trip is costing you, per pound of flour, you then need to divide the total cost of gas by the total pounds of mixed flour you're making.
Let's say you end up making an average of 50 pounds of flour a trip.


In our sample scenario, the total cost of travel is $8.80. This, divided by 50 pounds of flour, lets you know you need to add  $.18 to each pound of flour to discover the real cost per pound of your mix. In this scenario, the total cost of flour is $2.28 per pound, without calculating wear and tear on the vehicle or
driving/buying/mixing time accounted for.


You can do
this cost analysis with your current brand of flour, as well as ours, or with
any brand of gluten free product (like bread) you're thinking of buying. All you have to do is add the cost
of what it would be to make a the item with the roughly same ingredients as
the commercial product, using the ratios as a rough guide, then divide
the total cost of your batch and the bag of commercial mix each by the
poundage to get the price per pound/unit.


For comparison purposes, it's better to look at a bulk flour purchase from our site:





FOR UNITED STATES WITH SHIPPING COSTS ADDED IN...





25 pounds of bulk flour, with shipping is $76.00 - $3.04 per pound





FOR CANADA WITH SHIPPING COSTS ADDED IN...



25 pounds of bulk flour, with shipping, is $110.00 - $4.40US per pound


In the scenario above, the customer with access to the bulk food store, might choose to save  roughly two hours of time and wear and tear on their car. They may decide to have the flour delivered to their door, rather than save $.76 per pound, OR they may decide that it is worth their time to drive and mix flour, in order to save $19.00 total.

A customer living in an area where access to bulk goods is limited would almost always  save money by buying a premixed flour.







Hope this helps,



Naomi Poe