[quote name='Blue's']Hey DD:
My co-packer actually can do my sauce cheaper than I can out of the house. That has been the case for most sauce folks. Try re-crunching the numbers or have the co-packer break the costs down for you. If I can help, I'd be glad to.
Blue's
www.bluesbbq.net[/QUOTE]
I gotta go with Blue's on this one.
You have to consider your time in all of this as well.
We used to do hand made batches out of a rented commercial kitchen, after my wife and I got home from work, and honestly the time involved in cooking, bottling, labelling, etc was far more costly than having a copacker working for you.
We were lucky to have Canada's biggest and best sauce maker, Hatari Bros., right in our back yard. Sam Shivji, from Hatari was able to take our recipes and make them even better and more cost effective for us.
Copackers get volume discounts on bottles, ingredients and not to mention they take the sweat equity out of the process to a large degree.
Don't get me wrong, the first year saw me sneaking out of work whenever possible to check on our marination batches and to oversee the bottling.
Eventually the trust factor grew and thanks to Hatari Bros., we took our business to a whole new level.
My wife and I work for ourselves now and we have opened our own retail store here in Saskatoon and are in the business that we love, Fiery Foods.
I would check your numbers again and include the sweat equity in your calculations this time. You can still play mad scientist and create your own recipes, your R&D so to speak, but when it comes down to the actual bottling, labelling and such, for us a copacker was the way to go.
That's my 2 cents.