Croissant Cost Calculator
Classic French laminated butter croissant. Per-unit cost from a batch yield, against a typical bakery price of $4-5.50, and the highest food cost of any baked good on this site. Prefilled with US average ingredient costs. Edit any quantity or price to match what you actually pay, and the math updates as you type.
How much does it cost to make Croissant?
About $1.58 of ingredients, and $1.10 of that is butter. A croissant costs four times what a bagel costs to make, for the simple reason that butter is not an ingredient in a croissant so much as it is the product.
Where the money goes
| European butter (per unit) | 69.6% · $1.10 | |
|---|---|---|
| Milk + sugar + yeast + salt | 15.8% · $0.25 | |
| Bread flour (per unit) | 11.4% · $0.18 | |
| Egg wash share | 3.2% · $0.05 |
What 48 of them return at different prices
| Your price | Food cost % | Over ingredients, each | Over ingredients, 48 |
|---|---|---|---|
| $3.56 | 44.4% | $1.98 | $95.04 |
| $4.75 US average | 33.3% | $3.17 | $152.16 |
| $5.94 | 26.6% | $4.36 | $209.28 |
Ingredients only. Labor, packaging, fuel, and stall or platform fees come out of these figures.
Every other baked good on this site runs a food cost in the teens. A croissant runs 33.3%, and the whole difference is one line. Two ounces of European butter cost $1.10, or 70% of what the pastry costs to make; the flour underneath is 18 cents. Sourdough and bagels are flour products with a little fat in them, and a croissant is the reverse.
That single line is also why a croissant cannot be value-engineered. Cheaper butter has more water in it, and water turns lamination into bread: the layers steam apart instead of separating, and you get a roll. Skimping on the butter does not produce a cheaper croissant, it produces a different and worse product, which is not true of almost anything else in a bakery case. When butter moves 20%, as it regularly does, this pastry goes from a 33% food cost to a 38% one and there is nothing on the ingredient list to trade away.
So the price has to carry it, and $4.75 is the middle of the US bakery range. It also has to carry three days: mix and rest, laminate with folds and rests between them, shape, proof overnight, bake. That is a schedule, not a recipe, and it is the reason a croissant program either runs at volume or does not run. A dozen costs $18.96 in ingredients, and whether it is one dozen or five, you commit to the schedule three days before you know what Saturday will actually sell.