A question for chefs and industry types - if you were bringing in desserts from an outside source to sell on your menu for $8-10, what would you expect to pay for those desserts wholesale? Assume you'd be plating the items to order and maybe baking off pastry (that was already par-baked) daily, but all the prep and garnish were already made and ready to go.
Surely the product would be better if done entirely in house, but you need to be able to do a significant volume in desert business to justify the cost. Many places today just can't afford the luxury.
My present restaurant (for another week and a half) does a mix of house-made and pre-made desserts. I expect that this is the norm in most places except for 1) very high volume restaurants and 2) high-end/fine-dining. If you're going a lot of business as CapeCodChef says you can likely justify the labor of having someone on staff doing scratch-made desserts. In a fine dining setting you can generally charge enough to cover your costs. As a chef I'm okay with food cost being a little higher on a pre-made dessert since there's virtually no labor at all, just plate and garnish it. I will often throw in a feature/daily dessert that's made by Sweet Street or Devonshire, something that may cost between $1.75-$3.50 per serving. Food cost will vary a bit but the owner likes the desserts to run between $6-$9 give or take. That is balanced out by desserts like my house-made Zeppole which has about $.90-$1.00 in food cost.
Thank you all for the replies! I'm actually the pastry chef and was trying to figure out what I should charge the restaurant - sorry that wasn't clear from my original post. I have a formula I use when working with private clients but this is my first wholesale account, so I wanted to get a sense of industry norms.
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