Last month I posted about what the GF certification logo actually means and somebody asked why we don't just charge less and make it up on volume. I wish! So I went through what we paid for ingredients this year.
The base flours were less of a gap than I thought. Rice flour has been $.52 to $.66/lb for us and tapioca starch $1.20 to $1.51. A 50 lb bag of regular all purpose is $.51/lb on Webstaurant right now. More, sure, but not crazy. Almond flour is the expensive one at $3.65/lb, and that's really more of a keto thing. Binders are pricey per pound, psyllium (basically Metamucil) was $7.55/lb on our last order and xanthan gum is about $4/lb. You use very little of either.
Then there's the stuff that never shows up on an ingredient invoice. Anything that comes in without the supplier certifying it GF we have to test every lot, about $75 a test. The big one for us is plain M&Ms, since Mars doesn't give out product level gluten data. We've never had an M&M lot come back positive, but we're still required to test every lot received.
A few of you said the $1k/yr I quoted for GFCO was too low. That's just their fee. The cost is the hours - somebody chasing paperwork from every supplier, and chasing it again whenever one of them changes something.
Being dedicated gluten-free also means we can't spread our overhead over regular products like a shared facility can. And most GF brands are small so the runs are small, and cleaning and setting up a line costs about the same for 1,000 units as for 500,000. Then the distributor and the store each add their markup on top.
Volume would help, for sure. But a lot more people like the idea of GF than will pay extra for it, so the volume has not really shown up for most products. Kinda chicken and egg and I don't have a great answer for it yet. i wish there was a spray we could use in our mouths or that lines the gut and neutralizes it. haha