Making milk chocolate and milk pricing question

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to develop a (simplified) math formula for the cost of manufacturing milk chocolate.

  1. Milk chocolate is 10% to 50% cocoa (Hershey’s is 11%), at least 12% milk solids and the rest sugar. Is there any reason that a mass production milk chocolate bar would be over 12% milk?

  2. What percent of the cocoa bean is cocoa butter? Milk chocolate is 3.39% cocoa butter or more.

3)What is the US price for milk solids? NZ price is easy to find but I can’t seem to find American commodity pricing for it.

2

Seriously, Hershey’s is NOT chocolate. I’m convinced it’s brown solidified baby puke with added sugar and clever marketing.

Anyway, now I’ve got that off my chest, carry on…

3

You would use over 12% milk if your product tasted better with over 12% milk. Sure, you can put the minimum legal amount of your most expensive ingredients, but if it makes your chocolate taste like ass, the marginal price break won’t help your sales.

Anyway, at this point, you only have the ingredient cost of milk chocolate. Next you have production cost, packaging cost, marketing cost, distribution cost, storage cost to worry about.

4

Useful answers before snark, isn’t that the rule?

Does this help?

5

I had seen that before but I didn’t see “milk solids” should I use dry milk instead?

6

Did you look under Federal Order Milk Component Values?

7

What? How does this contribute to the thread?

:confused: