Doubling the Recipe Doesn't Halve the Work: Pricing Big Batches

"Can I get 12 dozen for the office party — and is there a bulk discount?" Your instinct says yes and 20% off, because that's what stores do. But you're not a store, and here's the math your discount should actually follow.

The three curves

When an order doubles, three costs scale three different ways:

• Ingredients scale linearly. Double cookies, double flour. 2× the order = 2× the ingredient cost. No savings hiding here.
• Labor scales sub-linearly — but nowhere near half. Doubling a batch doesn't double your time: one shopping trip, one setup, one cleanup, longer but shared oven sessions. Realistically, 2× the order costs about 1.5–1.7× the hours. That gap — the 30–50 minutes you don't work — is the only real money available for a discount.
• Packaging scales linearly or worse. 12 dozen cookies is 12 boxes, or one giant tray you now have to buy. No discount lives here either.

So what's an honest bulk discount?

Price the big order the same way you price everything — ingredients + packaging at full scale, labor at your actual estimated hours — and the discount appears naturally. Example: one dozen decorated cookies at $42. Twelve dozen priced naively: $504. Priced honestly (12× ingredients and packaging, ~8× labor instead of 12×): about $430. That's a real 15% discount you can announce proudly — and every dollar of it came from hours you genuinely won't work, not from your profit.

The rule: discount the saved labor, never the ingredients, never your rate.

Where big orders go wrong

Watch for the scale traps: your mixer only holds so much (three batches, not one big one — labor savings shrink), your oven only fits so many trays (bottleneck hours), and 12 dozen anything needs fridge and counter space that displaces other paying orders. If a bulk order crowds out two regular orders, its price should reflect that — that's not greed, that's rent for your capacity.

The script

"For 12 dozen I can do $430 instead of $504 — bulk orders save on my prep time and I pass that along. I'll need the order confirmed with a 50% deposit by Tuesday to block the oven time." Firm, generous, and mathematically bulletproof.