Cost of food 😱

[shellyleppard]

Just been to our local fete at the park. Lady selling loaded cookies.....£14 for 4 !!!! AIBU to think this is very expensive?? There was someone selling churros 4 for £6, pick and mix £2.49 . These seem more reasonable prices or am I just getting tight fisted with money in my old age 🤣🤣

That's pretty standard for an independent bakery.

@tumblingdowntherabbithole thanks, I've not been to many events and forgotten how expensive they get

I don't mind paying for quality food, but it's so often cheapened with crap replacement ingredients. Went to a food festival a couple of weeks ago and dh bought a cookie pie (vom). It was absolutely foul - crap chocolate, and tasted of sugar and veg oil. Not a hint of butter.

If it’s that much at a fete they would be £7 £8 at a festival etc . Someone was showing the other day how much it costs them to attend these events and it’s mind blowing there isn’t much profit once they’ve paid every single overhead .

£3.50 for a loaded cookie from a local bakery at an event sounds standard. I can’t see what’s wrong with any of those prices to be honest

I thought this was going to be about supermarkets 😂

We have a pseudo farmshop near me. We went for the first time last week looking for particular yoghurts. It was like a small supermarket with gift shop stuff and a cafe. Virtually all of the stuff sold there is bought from supermarkets then priced up. We found some cakes we'd seen in B&M home bargains and were cheap and nasty, but they were flogging them at an outrageous price. They had no locally sourced produce at all. We don't eat meat, but I expect their meat was from a nearby meat wholesaler. The plastic parsley appears to add to the farmshopping experience 😂

Well, there's a lot to cover - baking time, ingredients, equipment, electricity, gas, insurance, hygiene certificates, stall costs and equipment, advertising and then taking a profit.

That £3.50 per cookie doesn't actually make much once you take all the above into account.

@smallglassbottle reminds me of the butchers in the 70's when I was little lol

Yes, exactly like that 😂

Maybe you missed the chunks of gold?

&3.50 for a cookie is mad.

Loaded cookies aren't the same as regular cookies, they're stuffed with filling and have various toppings as well - bits of chocolate bar, or brownie, or cake.

£3.50 for each is perfectly reasonable when you account for all the costs, ingredients, equipment, time etc.

As someone with a baking business I attend a lot of these events and that sounds pretty standard.

As others have said, there’s a lot of overheads for small businesses. Bear in mind the stall probably cost £25-50 depending on where it is. So before they even start turning a profit they need to sell up to £50 worth of stuff. There will be fees to take out of each sale for using a card machine, the cost of a box, so maybe £1-1.50 on each set of 4 has gone.

Have you seen the price of chocolate these days? I buy bags of Belgian chocolate chips that were £25 last year and are £40+ this year.

If they’re putting Buenos, Creme eggs or Reeces etc in the cookies, that’s easily another £1 or 2 gone on fillings, plus butter at £2 a pack, brown sugar, costs a bloody fortune, good vanilla extract is £6-7 a pot for 60g which will be £1 a batch of 8 or 12 cookies.

Add that up and include even minimum wage for the baker (plus the time for their assistant to stand on the stall with them if they have one) and your cookies all of a sudden look cheap!!

If you’re comparing them to a pack of 4 from Tesco for £1.50 obviously they look like a lot, but it’s a completely different product and experience.

All that being said, nobody is forcing you to buy them, but if you want to support artisan bakers and entrepreneurs then maybe consider the value you get rather than the price.

£10 for a pot of honey always makes me laugh!

Surely the easiest answer is just not buy them. Your body won't miss fat, sugar and synthetic flavourings.

Hahaha what's a pseudo farm shop 😅 I'd love to know

I thought 'loaded' meant cannabis cookies. Was going to say £14 for 4 was reasonable...

It's a farmshop that pretends to sell local produce, but in reality, it's just supermarket or wholesaler shite that they then overprice and tart up with plastic parsley 😂

They can charge what they want, you don't have to buy them

@Meadowfinch i didn't lol the price was enough to put me off

That's £3.50 each, which is the same price as at the small and not affluent town in Yorkshire so the type of place the average Mumsnetter would shudder at the mention of, I visited today.

I didn't buy one because they were queuing out the door and down the street and my parking ticket was about to run out. But clearly plenty of people thought they were worth the money.

@thenightsky they probably would have sold better 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I’ll never forget my rage at paying £19 for 2 sugar and lemon crepes at a festival a couple of years ago 😂😂😂
I don’t mind paying for good food and quality ingredients but no one can convince me that this was either, and they were served on one polystyrene plate with a plastic fork!!

I do begrudge spending a lot of money on baked goods where corners have been cut, margarine instead of proper butter (depending on what’s been baked), cheap chocolate stuffed with fat/oil, just shortcuts. I understand that good ingredients cost more but why am I being charged so much for shit ingredients?

Sounds ghastly 😂😂

Thanks, now I know what to watch out for!

And it makes me cry, but I still buy 1 jar where they sell local raw honey if I happen to find a local event on my travels (I'm a honey worshipper and probably an idiot as well).
There are about 3 small independent shops where I live selling local honey from some local gardens, very small scale beekeepers within a 10-15 miles radius. Equally expensive. My favourite honey will no longer be produced, the beekeeper is giving up their beehives, apparently not doing too well this year and they also struggled a bit last year . This is a real worry, their garden is not that far from my house and in my own garden I've only seen 1 bee this year I think . I've either seen the same bee twice or two different bees, on the same flower but on different days. Nothing else so far.

OP I agree with you, those prices are high. Not unusual but still high.
Baking can't possibly be a profitable business at today's prices for ingredients. Plus all the fancy packaging they often use. Not to mention the cost of running an oven. I don't know why people bother with various cake/cookies making businesses. It must be heartbreaking when real passion and skill are involved.
I used to bake a lot, often adventurous or elaborate recipes. I'd often bake when friends asked me where they'd gave a charity cake sale at their work. It used to be quite an investment on my part but I didn't mind at all and I'd never tell them how much it cost me. I enjoyed doing it and cost wasn't a real issue. I stopped all that and I bake a lot less for us as well. Too expensive to prepare a good quality cake.

Yes, I'm well aware of what they're like thank you & £3.50 IS ridiculous in MY opinion,

you are entitled to your own opinion, it doesn't make it fact.