BBQ plates at a church festival

[mike3ga88]

I am going to be doing pulled pork sandwich plates at my church fall festival. I`m looking at charging $5 a plate for a sandwich, 1 oz. bag of chips, pickle spear if they want one and either bottle of water or soda. My question is do you think its being cheap if I offer store brand sodas like a variety of orange, grape, root beer instead of coke products? This is my first event and was wondering what most people do. Thanks

 

[lemans]

8lb pork butt at $1.79 lb is going to be 14.50
You will get 20-25 plus sandwiches. 25 hardrolls @.95 each generic soda @ $4.50 a case and a jar of pickles
3.59.
Your cost is like $2.38 each not counting paper goods and bar b cue sauce. $5.00 you r just breaking even
$8.00 is more like it

 

[lemans]

And it's still a deal!

 

[mike3ga88]

I was able to get the butt for 1.47 lb. and I have a bakery outlet store that I can score some buns pretty cheap. Going to be smoking 40 lbs. of meat for this event, we will have close to 200.00 in cost for everything, if I can get close to only a 40% loss in cooking weight that will give me 24 lbs cooked meat and 4 oz sandwiches thats a decent amount. With this being our very first time doing this and not sure what the other food will be selling for we wasnt sure what to charge, dont want to get stuck with all that food lol. 

 

[dirtsailor2003]

Typically figuring 3x's your costs of everything you're selling is where you need to be.

 

[mike3ga88]

When we committed to doing this we had 1 other food vendor signed up and they do hotdogs, corn dogs and such. Found out today there will be someone doing Reuben sandwiches and someone doing smoked sausage sandwiches along with a pizza vendor and roasted corn. That's now a bigger issue because even though none of that stuff has nearly the time and effort put into it like smoked butts. We have decided to ask 6.00 a plate now for sandwich small bag of chips and water or soda, at that price we are underselling our product but it will be a profit, I'm afraid with the competition if we ask more we may not move much pork because you never know if the consumer really knows what all went into putting out that good sandwich

 

[glennmc]

Mike your $6.00 is a steal.  Don't worry about the other guys, you are better than a dog/burger.  Just have fantastic a fantastic product and -they- will be the ones with left-overs.

 

[mike3ga88]

Thanks Glenn, we ended up doing 6$ plates, I took no pics of the entire process with it being my first ever attempt at selling my product. I smoked 40 lbs of butt, got 21 lbs of finished product. We ended up with about 6 lbs left, in the end of course we didn't get rich but we did cover our costs and the most satisfying part of the day was people asking if I did this for a living because it was that good. Had one gentleman tell me he knows his BBQ and he always tastes it before saucing it and he told me my product didn't need sauce. In the end it was fun but not sure I'm ready to jump in again lol

 

[61sleepercab]

Next time have some nice business cards with your contact info, have on counter for some cheap advertising for repeat customers. Hope you have fun. Mark