Posted by George on April 08, 1999 at 17:53:29:
In Reply to: new to the biz posted by Marc Rentzer on April 08, 1999 at 00:15:17:
: A family of 4 wants me to make two drop-offs a week.
IMHO you have a problem here, key work "drop off", if you are not producing in a commercial licensed kitchen. One of the beauties of the PC thing is you get around the legal requirements of many Health Departments by producing the product in the clients home. Otherwise in most states and defiantly NY you have to have a legal kitchen to produce food for sale.
That said:
:They want to eat the same meal from Mon to Wed, and another meal to be eaten Th/Fri. All they want is dinner.
: How should I charge? I'm in NY if that helps.
Again IMHO the answer is "what the market will bear"
One pricing method is to figure how much your time is worth, add that to your overhead (gas, insurance, advertising etc) and add on the cost of the product purchased.
You also might want to consider how much you need to support your self. How many days and hours a year you can to work. Then divide the total income required by the number of hours (I know of web folks that do it this way) That would give you a bare minimum hourly rate.
You might also see what any other PC's in the area are charging.
I've seen some discussion here to look at it from a food cost % point of view but I really think that is irrelevant. Why should you make more or less depending on the cost of the product prepared?
A fixed price seems just as ridiculous for the same reason.
Hope this helped!
George