Pricing on a hunch usually means one of two things: leaving money on the table, or losing it slowly without noticing. The fix isn't complicated, but it does mean actually accounting for everything that goes into making a product - not just the obvious material cost.
Materials
Start with the direct cost of every raw material in the recipe or bill of materials, at the price you actually paid - not a round number you remember from a while back. If you buy the same material at different prices over time, use the batch you're actually consuming (FIFO), not a flat average that can drift away from reality.
Packaging
Packaging is a real material cost and belongs in the same calculation as raw materials - the jar, the label, the box, the shipping mailer. It's an easy one to forget because it doesn't feel like "the product," but it's still a cost incurred for every unit made.
Labour
Estimate the time it genuinely takes to produce one unit, and apply a real hourly labour cost to it. This doesn't need to be precise to the second - a reasonable, consistent estimate per product is far more useful than skipping labour cost entirely because it's harder to measure than materials.
Overhead
Rent, utilities, equipment depreciation, insurance - these costs exist whether you make one unit or a thousand, so they need to be allocated across production somehow. A simple approach: divide your monthly overhead by your typical monthly production volume, and apply that per-unit figure consistently.
Waste and loss
Account for the batches that don't come out right, the trims that get discarded, the material lost to spoilage or spillage. If you never track this, your cost calculation is quietly optimistic - real production always has some loss, and ignoring it means underpricing.
Margin
Once you have a real total cost, decide your margin deliberately - as a percentage on top of that number - rather than picking a sale price that "feels right" and hoping it covers everything. This is the only way to know in advance whether a price is actually profitable.
Automatic calculation in Masto Control
Masto Control builds this cost automatically from your BOM and actual material batch costs, so you don't maintain a separate spreadsheet alongside your production data. As material prices change, the calculated cost updates with them - and margin against your set sale price is visible per product, not recalculated by hand every time something changes.