Price your freeze-dried candy like a business.
Guessing what to charge per bag is how candy businesses quietly lose money. FreezeCalc does the math the pros do — batch cost, bag pricing, and machine payoff — in about two minutes, right in your browser.
Batch Cost Calculator
What one freeze dryer run really costs: candy, electricity, packaging, machine wear, and your time — broken down per bag.
Work out my batch cost → 🏷️Bag Pricing Calculator
Turn your cost per bag into a retail price with a real margin — including Etsy, market, and wholesale fees.
Find my bag price → 📈Freeze Dryer ROI Calculator
Will a $2,000–$5,000 freeze dryer pay for itself? See your payoff month and a 3-year profit projection before you buy.
Check the payoff math → 📦Mylar Bag Size Calculator
Puffed candy needs bigger bags than its weight suggests. Get the bag size, bag count, and oxygen absorber cc for your batch.
Size my bags → ⚖️Candy Yield Calculator
Candy barely loses weight in the dryer — see what your load really weighs coming out, and how many bags it fills.
Check my yield →Why FreezeCalc exists
Freeze-dried candy is one of the fastest-growing cottage businesses around — but almost everyone prices by copying whatever the seller at the next market stall charges. That works right up until the electricity bill, packaging order, and machine payment arrive.
These calculators use the same unit-economics approach any food manufacturer uses, tuned to how freeze-dried candy actually works: long machine cycles, per-bag packaging, and channel fees that quietly eat 10–15% of every sale. Everything runs in your browser — we never see your numbers.
Start with the batch cost calculator; it hands your cost per bag straight to the pricing tool.
The numbers behind a freeze-dried candy business
These are the reference figures the calculators default to — 2026 US market, home-scale production. Change any of them inside a tool if your own costs differ.
| Line item | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Home freeze dryer, medium | $3,500 (+$200–400 accessories) |
| Candy cycle length | 24–36 hours |
| Electricity per batch | $4–8 (≈1.0–1.5 kW draw) |
| Capacity, medium unit | 5–7 lbs candy → 26–37 × 3 oz bags |
| Packaging per bag | $0.15–0.20 (mylar + label) |
| All-in cost per 3 oz bag | $1.10–2.00 |
| Typical retail price | $8–14 per 3 oz bag |
| Etsy effective fees | ≈10–13% per sale |
| Healthy gross margin | 55–75% of price |
The single most common pricing mistake is leaving three lines out of the cost side: electricity, machine depreciation, and your own hour per batch. Drop those and a bag that truly costs $1.60 looks like it costs $0.95 — which is exactly how a stall that “feels profitable” ends the season down money.
Weight out vs. volume out
Freeze-drying candy is not like freeze-drying fruit. Fruit is 80–90% water and shrinks to a fraction of its load weight. Candy is mostly sugar, so it keeps nearly all of it — gummies lose 15–22%, marshmallows 15–18%, taffy and caramels 7–15%, Skittles-type shells 3–7%, and hard candy 1–3%. What explodes instead is volume: candy roughly doubles or triples in size as trapped moisture flashes off and puffs the structure.
That single fact drives two decisions. Your yield stays close to your load weight, so bag counts are predictable. But your bag size must be chosen by volume, not weight — a 3 oz bag of freeze-dried gummies needs roughly the footprint of a 6×9″ quart bag, not the 4×6″ that 3 oz of raw candy would fit into.
Freeze-dried candy business FAQ
How much does it cost to make a bag of freeze-dried candy?
A typical 3 oz retail bag costs roughly $1.10–$2.00 all-in for a US home producer in 2026: about $0.75–$1.30 of candy, $0.15–$0.20 of packaging, and $0.15–$0.30 of electricity plus machine depreciation once a $3,500 dryer is spread across its batches. Labor is the line people forget — about an hour per batch of loading, bagging, sealing, and labeling. The batch cost calculator works it out for your own numbers.
What is a good profit margin on freeze-dried candy?
Most sellers target 55–75% gross margin after channel fees. At $1.50 cost per bag, $8 on a market table is an 81% gross margin; the same bag on Etsy nets about $7.00 after roughly 10–13% in effective fees. Published figures range from 40% to 85%, and the spread is almost entirely about whether the seller counted electricity, machine wear, and labor. The bag pricing calculator works backwards from the margin you want.
How long does it take for a freeze dryer to pay for itself?
For a candy business running a medium home unit, 6–18 months is the honest range. The arithmetic is investment ÷ monthly profit, but the variable that decides it is sell-through, not machine size: a dryer running weekly at 70% sell-through will out-earn a bigger one run a few times a season. Home preservation use without sales typically takes 18–24 months to break even on food savings. The ROI calculator projects 36 months out.
How much does freeze-dried candy weigh after drying?
Much more than people expect. Gummies lose about 15–22% of their weight, marshmallows 15–18%, taffy and caramels 7–15%, Skittles-type shells 3–7%, and hard candy just 1–3%. Fresh fruit, by comparison, loses 80–90%. Volume is what changes — candy roughly doubles or triples in size.
Do freeze-dried candy bags need oxygen absorbers?
For candy sold to eat within weeks or months, most sellers skip them: sugar doesn't oxidize the way fats do, and the real enemy is moisture, which a properly sealed mylar bag already handles. For long shelf-life claims or humid climates, budget roughly 100cc of absorber per quart of bag volume — the mylar bag calculator sizes it for you.
Are the FreezeCalc calculators free?
Yes — free, no signup, no email address. Everything runs in your browser, so the numbers you type never reach a server. Every formula is published in plain text on its own page, so you can check the math or rebuild it in a spreadsheet.