Hello hello dear HIVERS and beautiful people of the @beentrepreneur community a few days ago in a post I shared a super delicious cupcake recipe that I consider ideal for sale and today I'm coming to this beautiful community to share with you how to calculate the costs in case you want to sell this type of product and leaving you this idea of entrepreneurship.   Before starting with the main information of the post, I would like to tell you briefly about an experience of a friend who sold cupcakes in almost industrial quantities and whose business always left me with the idea that it was something super feasible.   A few years ago, around 2012, a friend and her husband came up with the idea of selling simple, undecorated, snack type cupcakes, they saw the success and then aimed higher, to sell “wholesale” and began to walk from canteen to canteen, from schools and universities to offer them, to make a long story short, they sold a lot, so much so that they even bought a car, a Chevrolet Corsa.   How was their way of selling them? They took cupcakes on consignment to the cafes of the institutions, with this venture they accommodated their little house (they had a little ranch), built little by little a house of platabanda and they did quite well and then when in 2017 the situation tightened they left the country with their children and currently live in the United States.   They started small in the coffee shop at the university where my friend's husband was studying and then they started offering to other places and when they realized they were already selling to many schools and delivering in their car all over Anaco. With this I just want to give you a small sales idea for which you don't need a lot of capital to start.  The cupcakes can also be sold decorated and the great advantage is that unlike the cakes you don't need great skills in decoration to achieve beautiful results, they are super easy to decorate, I will show you some pictures of how I did to decorate these in various colors 🥰 and I will also share with you the cost calculation to make them decorated and simple in case you want to take the idea of my friends and make a venture with cupcakes.   By the way, I feel it is necessary to point out that the recipe I shared for my cupcakes, besides being delicious and yielding, is super resistant to time, they stay like new for many days, I used to sell these in a little bodega I had some years ago in my house and they stayed soft for quite a long time.  I prepared my super Italian meringue that I already shared the recipe with you once. I had to decorate 20 cupcakes and I prepared a meringue with 3 eggs and I had rather a little bit left over hehehehe but if I'm honest with you in this kind of things I prefer to have some left over and not missing, because it is quite cumbersome to prepare more mixture just to finish some few missing, if there is meringue left over we can make sighs that everyone loves and you can also sell them if you want to take advantage of everything, this is better than having to beat again. ||| |-|-| ||| |||   Once I had the meringue ready, I scooped some into several containers and added the colors that matched the theme, for these intense tones I used Colorisa powder coloring.   In the pictures you can see how I placed the colors so that when I started to put them on the cupcakes they would come out in different colors. I placed on a sugar bag the colors by lines and then I rolled the bag and placed inside the piping bag. ||| | - | - |  

**Cost calculations**

  I am going to share with you the costs of both options, simple without decoration and decorated with Italian meringue, in the cost calculation I am not going to include the selling price because I think that pricing is something very personal, but I advise that the minimum selling price is double the expense it takes to prepare something, Reasons? If something goes wrong (which sometimes happens) with your half of the profit you can redo the work and it would not come out of your pocket. The topic of calculating the selling price is very extensive, it has many variants, and not to make it so long and lose the purpose of the post here I will only share with you the calculation of the costs.   To get the costs I need to know the unit value of each material.   Materials for the cupcakes: * 4 and a half cups of leavening flour. * 2 and a half cups of sugar. * 6 eggs. * 1 and a half cups of liquid milk. * 450 grams of margarine. * 1 and a half tablespoons vanilla. * #11 sugar cube trays.   You may notice that some of the materials in the recipe are measured by cups and I need to know their exact weight to calculate costs, so I am going to take those measurements and weigh them to have more accurate data for the cost calculation.   I will share with you as a reference the prices in dollars of these materials in my city, these prices are recent after the recent increases that triggered even more inflation in Venezuela. It is important to note that prices may vary from city to city, even in the same city depending on the local, I try to locate prices set in dollars, because in bolivars increase much faster and lose validity in a short time (one day) prices in dollars but also increase are a little more stable. ||||| | - | - | - | - | ||| |-|-|   After knowing the prices of each material to know the unit costs, I weighed the sugar and the wheat flour, in the following pictures you can see how much a cup of each of these materials weighs. ||| |-|-|   Tip: if you make recipes measured by cups, try to always measure flush with the measuring cup and of course use measuring cups and utensils, here are some example photos of how I measure when I work with measuring cups and spoons. |||| | - | - | - |   Now to the cost tables, in the following tables I calculated the unit cost of each material and thus calculated the exact cost of each preparation, to each table I added an extra 20% for all those expenses that we cannot account for (detergents, water, electricity, transportation, other materials).   To calculate the unit value I must know the cost of each material and divide it by the number of units or grams it weighs, for example 1kg of sugar has a price of $ 1.51 the unit cost would be $ 1.51 / 1000 grams and the unit cost per gram would be $ 0.00151 after knowing how much each gram or unit of material costs me, I multiply by the amount I will use in each recipe, and thus I get the exact value of the materials I am using. Then I add all these values, add 20% for the extras and there I get the total cost, as this time it is a product that yields for 40 units, I divide by 40 to know how much each ponquesitos costs me. > **Note:** The cost of liquid milk was calculated based on the cost of powdered milk, that package in the photo yields 3 liters of milk.   To know the cost of the Toppers I asked a girl who works with this and she told me that for 20 Toppers printed, cut and glued on the plate she charges 2$, so the price of placing a Topper would be 0.1$ per each Topper.  The unit cost for each cupcake gave me 0.44$ taking into account the decoration and Italian meringue, they could sell for at least 0.9$ each.   The unit cost of each plain, undecorated cupcake was $0.2 c.u. These could be sold for at least $0.4 c.u. and the profit would be approximately equivalent to the expenses.  So far my publication of today I hope you liked it and if you want to start a new business and do not know which or add extra income to your economy serve as a basis and inspiration ❤️ the recipe for these ponquesitos and Italian meringue with all the tricks and tips I left them in a previous publications here I will leave you below again the links ⬇️ I say goodbye for the moment I send you a sweet and empowered hug, I wish you much success and blessings to all and in all your projects. until next time 🤗. * Cupcake recipe * Italian meringue recipe *** _{The Pictures used throughout my publication, **are my property**. The photos used throughout the post were taken with my **Redmi 10S phone**. Banners & Signatures Made in *Corel Draw Photo-Paint* Translation to English with *DeepL*} ***

**My Social Media**

[](https://www.instagram.com/gelartgelatinas/) [](https://www.tiktok.com/@gelartgelatinas/) [](https://x.com/GelartGelatinas)