Gas for the generator is where it would kill you. Your best bet is to make all the grilled cheese as fast as possible to save on gas and dispense them throughout the day.
I live on earth. Even if you’re buying bulk, it will still be more than a dollar to make. The bread alone bought in bulk would still be around $0.25 per slice. That’s 50 percent of the cost right there.
I just priced it out from ingredients bought from Sam’s club. 33 cents for two slices of bread, one slice of American cheese, and I added an extra 5 cents for butter substitute.
I would love to see your source. I don’t buy bread in bulk but I have a friend who owns a local restaurant in my town. I know how much he pays for the bread he serves for breakfast and it doesn’t get cheaper than that.
I’ll take your word for it. I’m not a member so it doesn’t show me the price. Looking forward to all the profitable $1 grilled cheese trucks coming soon.
This is not the cheapest, you can get better pricing than this with a Costco business account. Your friend is probably not serving the lowest price bulk bread available, they probably have some self respect.
Well even with that bread you are still spending about $0.25 per sandwich on bread. I still don’t see how that’s profitable after adding cheese and butter. You could do it by drastically reducing the amount of cheese and butter but is it really a grilled cheese when you put a single shred of cheese on it?
Meijer and Walmart store brands of cheap ass white bread are 22 slices, Kroger is 21, and for a name brand example Sunbeam is 22. Nicer bread like Pepperidge Farm or Brownberry/Oroweat tends to be in the range of 16 slices per loaf (baring the thin sliced stuff) though.
And butter for about $0.25 per ounce (you might use .5 oz per sandwich.) EDIT: checked my butter in my fridge, you’re probably using 1/4 of an ounce per sandwich if that.
And none of these are in bulk, you can probably cut the cost in half or less buying even more generic products in bulk.
Where I live, it’s currently $4Cdn for a loaf of basic white Wonder bread, it’s $8.50Cdn for a stick of salted butter, and $5.50Cdn for a pack of 22 slices of processed cheese (not the thick slice type). My country is currently going through a bit of a cost of living crisis because shelter, heating, food costs are becoming insane. How much are those things where you live? I think it’s interesting the differences based on where we all are. 1$ for an entire grilled cheese sandwich in Canada would be considered an incredible deal for takeout food pricing.
(presuming you mean $CAD for Canadian dollars, not cdn)
$4cad = $2.90usd = 13.2c/slice
$5.50cad = $4usd = 18.2c/slice
That’s 44.5c each.
That’s 125% profit. Given that a common margin aimed for is 100%, this is a good deal with your over priced products. And I don’t believe you can’t get basic white bread for less than $4cad in Canada.
In the UK I can currently buy an 800g loaf of bread for 45p (£0.45), a 500g tub of soft spread butter substitute for 99p (£0.99), and a 200g pack of 10 cheese slices for 65p (£0.65).
Each sandwich would cost about 12p (£0.12) to make, excluding the energy costs.
Doubling up on the cheese, or using higher quality cheese would still keep it under 20p per sandwich, and that’s off the shelf costs, no bulk discounts.
Bread in Finland is about 0.1 usd per slice Low quality cheese is about 8 usd / kg, assuming you need about 20g/portion that’s 0.16 usd. Total is about 36c per portion.
If we assume power consumption of 5kw for the whole operation and power cost of 20c/kWh, that’s 1usd/h
Assuming sales of 60 units per hour -one per minute, thats 60 usd of revenue per hour and 22.6 usd of non labor cost, it leaves 37.4e for labor, taxes, permits, tools, fuel.
It’s at least only feasible in high volume locations.
When allocating food cost (in your costs) 36% is around where you want it-30% would be more ideal, but you can get that through sales, bulk discount etc. So, regardless of volume food cost % is basically where it should be.
Some numbers in spain: slice cheese .19/slice bread .08/ slice (.16) Margarine (because: costs!) .04/10g .39
To get closer to a feasible food cost you’d have to sell at 1.25
I was with you until you suggested it would use 5kWh every hour. That’s an insane amount of power even if they were using an electric griddle, which is unlikely. A small generator would be enough to power the lighting and refrigeration and then the griddle would run on gas, which is way cheaper than electricity (or the petrol for the electric generator).
I’d imagine energy costs would be a fraction of what you’ve calculated, and would scale up along with any increase in sales volume.
Depends on where you are, gas use is very rare here. Anyway the energy cost is a negligible part, you can halve or double it and it won’t change the business case.
It doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Based on some quick searches, bulk cheese breaks down to about $.19 a slice, two pieces of bread is about $.10, butter is wobbly here because I don’t know exactly how much they’d be using, but let’s say half an ounce/1 Tbsp is about $.25? Probably not a whole lot of profit after the cart and rent for the space, but you could probably get close to breaking even if you sold enough and/or had a better bulk supplier than what I can see with 5 minutes of research.
It’s gonna margarine, not butter. Or some other kind of butter flavored spread.
If you wanted to get a better estimate, go to McDonald’s, order something and add cheese. Whatever they charge you for the slice of cheese is probably double their cost.
There would be a line around the block. This is the grilled cheese of everyone’s childhood. Add a sprinkle of salt or use salted butter when cooking on the skillet and I would be in line with everyone else holding a fiver.
Really? A very light sprinkle of salt when the sandwich is on the buttered griddle is the shit, especially if you’re using a cheese that is lower in salt. Get that nice crust on the bread with a savory pop. Combine that with a tomato soup and it’s the bomb.
Don’t knock it until you try it.
Edit: bloody purists. Gonna turn this into a melt/grilled cheese thing aren’t you.
I say otherwise, & I will happily bathe in the righteous flames of the eternally damned, rather than suffer the unholy blight of pickles on my beloved grilled cheese.
The $.99 Grilled Cheese Food Truck. Conveniently located next to the $1 Grilled Cheese Food Truck. Come with $1, leave with a grilled cheese and money still in your pocket (yes, we give change).
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