Guide
Escandallo: what it is and how to make one for your bakery
An escandallo is the Spanish name for a full recipe cost sheet: cost per unit = (ingredients at the quantity used + packaging + labour + oven energy + a share of overhead) ÷ units the batch yields. In the example below, a 10-slice cheesecake costs $15.07 in ingredients but $33.71 in total, so pricing it on ingredients alone would hide more than half the real cost. Here is what goes into an escandallo, how to make one step by step, and how to turn it into a price.
What an escandallo is
In Spain, professional kitchens and pastry shops routinely work from escandallos. The word means a costing breakdown: one sheet per product that lists everything the product consumes and what each thing costs at the quantity actually used, not at the price of the pack you bought.
Most guides on the term are written for restaurants, where the sheet ends at the ingredients on the plate. A bakery needs more: a cake also uses a box, an hour of your hands and an hour of oven, and those often cost more than the flour and butter.
The result of an escandallo is two numbers: the cost of one unit you sell, and the share of the price that goes into ingredients. With those two you can set prices on purpose instead of copying the bakery down the road.
What goes into a bakery escandallo
A complete escandallo for baked goods has six kinds of lines. Leave one out and the cost looks lower than it is.
- Ingredients, each costed by the quantity the recipe uses: pack price ÷ pack size × quantity.
- Waste on raw ingredients: hulled strawberries or peeled fruit lose weight, so cost them on the usable weight.
- Sub-recipes, such as a frosting, a crust or a syrup, costed once and then used by weight in every product that has them.
- Packaging per unit sold: the box, the cake board, the label, the bag.
- Labour: the minutes of hands-on work times what an hour of your time is worth, even if nobody pays you a wage yet.
- Machines and overhead: the oven and mixer energy for the time they run, plus a share of rent, insurance, phone and other fixed costs for the time the batch occupies your kitchen.
How to make an escandallo step by step
Do this once per product you sell. The first one takes half an hour; after that, most of the ingredient prices are already written down.
The guide to costing a recipe works through the same steps for a batch of cookies.
- Write the recipe with exact quantities and the yield: how many slices, cookies or loaves one batch makes.
- For each ingredient, work out the unit price from what you paid: pack price ÷ pack size.
- Multiply the unit price by the quantity in the recipe, and add up the ingredient lines.
- Add packaging for the units the batch yields.
- Time the hands-on work and multiply by your hourly rate.
- Add oven energy (average kW × hours × your electricity price) and a share of fixed costs (monthly fixed costs ÷ hours you bake per month × hours this batch takes).
- Add everything up and divide by the yield: that is your cost per unit.
Read next: How to calculate recipe cost, step by step
Worked example: a cheesecake escandallo
This is an example with realistic prices, not a benchmark: use your own receipts. The cheesecake yields 10 slices, takes 40 minutes of hands-on work and 60 minutes in an electric oven, and occupies the kitchen for an hour and a half in total. The baker values her time at $18 an hour and has $180 a month of fixed costs over about 60 baking hours, so $3 for every hour the kitchen is in use.
The ingredients add up to $15.07. With packaging, labour, oven and overhead the batch costs $33.71, which is $3.37 a slice.
| Line | Quantity | Unit price | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cream cheese | 3 blocks (24 oz) | $3.00 a block | $9.00 |
| Eggs | 4 | $0.35 each | $1.40 |
| Sugar | 150 g | $2.00 per kg | $0.30 |
| Heavy cream | 1 cup | $2.00 per cup | $2.00 |
| Graham crackers | 150 g | $4.50 per 400 g box | $1.69 |
| Butter | 60 g | $5.00 per lb | $0.66 |
| Flour | 20 g | $1.00 per kg | $0.02 |
| Box and cake board | 1 | $1.80 | $1.80 |
| Labour | 40 min | $18.00 per hour | $12.00 |
| Oven energy | 60 min | 2 kW at $0.17 per kWh | $0.34 |
| Overhead | 1.5 h | $3.00 per hour | $4.50 |
| Total for the batch | 10 slices | $3.37 per slice | $33.71 |
From the escandallo to a price
Once you know the cost, the price follows from the margin you want: price = cost ÷ (1 − target margin). For a 35% margin on the cheesecake, $33.71 ÷ 0.65 = $51.86, which you would round to $52. At $52 you keep $18.29 per cake, a 35.2% margin, and ingredients are 29% of the price.
Compare that with pricing on ingredients alone. A baker who sees $15.07 of ingredients and charges $40, about two and a half times that, feels well covered. The full escandallo says otherwise: $40 − $33.71 leaves $6.29, a margin under 16%, and that before a single slice is wasted or given away.
Margin and markup are not the same thing. A 35% margin is a markup of about 54% on cost. Decide which one you are talking about before you set targets, and set prices before sales tax, then add whatever tax applies where you sell.
Read next: Bakery profit margin: how to work it out and how to raise it, Profit margin calculator for bakers
Cost escandallo or ingredients only?
Restaurants often keep an ingredients-only escandallo and track labour and rent separately as a share of sales. A micro bakery makes fewer, slower products, and the gap between a quick cookie and a three-tier cake is mostly time, so a full cost escandallo per product shows which ones earn their place.
Waste belongs in either version. If a 1 lb box of strawberries costs $4.00 and 15% goes in the bin after hulling, the usable fruit costs $4.00 ÷ 0.85 = $4.71 a pound. Costing it at $4.00 makes every strawberry tart look cheaper than it is.
The ingredients' share of the price is your food cost percentage, worked out for a recipe and for a whole month in the food cost guide.
Read next: The food cost formula for bakers
Keeping escandallos up to date with Farinu
A spreadsheet escandallo is right on the day you make it. Then butter goes up and every sheet that uses butter is wrong until you fix it by hand.
Farinu keeps the escandallo for you. You enter each recipe with its ingredients, sub-recipes, packaging, labour and machine time once, and it costs it with your hourly rates, your energy prices and your monthly fixed costs. It suggests a price from the markup or target price you set, and when an ingredient price rises it shows a margin alert on every product that now sells below that target, with the price to charge instead.
You can start with the free costing tool and the downloadable template on this site. The free plan costs up to 10 recipes and takes up to 50 orders a month; Team removes both limits, adds helpers, sales and stock, and lets the assistant import your recipes from a photo or a spreadsheet.
Read next: Food cost calculator for bakers, Free recipe costing template for bakers
Questions
- What does escandallo mean in English?
- It is a recipe cost sheet or cost card: a breakdown of everything one product uses, each line priced at the quantity used, ending in the cost per unit.
- Should labour go into a bakery escandallo if I pay myself nothing?
- Yes. Put a value on your hour, even a modest one. Otherwise a product that takes three hours looks as profitable as one that takes twenty minutes, and you cannot see which ones are worth making.
- How often should I update my escandallos?
- Whenever an ingredient you buy often changes price. In Farinu the cost updates as soon as you record the new price, and a margin alert flags products below target.
- What percentage of the price should ingredients be?
- There is no single right number; it depends on how much time and packaging each product takes. Work out the full escandallo, set the margin you need, and let the ingredient percentage fall where it falls.
Related pages
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