How much do tapioca pearls cost per cup?

Pearls are the one ingredient every boba shop shares, and the one that's hardest to cost: you buy them dry, cook them in batches, and toss what's left after a few hours. Here is how the numbers work, using Bossen's published prices for its Large Boba as an example. Swap in your own supplier's numbers; the method is the same.

What a bag gives you

• A 6.6 lb (3 kg) bag lists at $10.18, or $53.88 for a case of 6 ($8.98 a bag).
• Bossen says each bag makes about 35 to 50 servings, with a suggested serving of 60–80 g for a 16 oz drink.
• Bossen also says to use cooked pearls within four hours, which is where the waste comes from.

Cost per drink

Divide the bag price by the servings you get from it:

Generous scoops mean fewer servings per bag, so the right-hand column is closer to a shop that serves a heavy portion. Buying by the case saves a little on every cup.

The pearls you throw out

If you cook a batch and throw out what's left after four hours, the pearls you did serve have to cover the cost of the ones you didn't. That's waste, and it's the number most shops never write down. Here is a single bag at 50 servings, with different shares of each batch thrown away:

Cooking smaller batches more often is the simplest way to bring this down, especially in quiet hours.

Pricing extra pearls

If you charge 75¢ for extra pearls and your real cost is about 25.4¢ a serving (single-bag price, 20% thrown out), the margin on that topping is about 66%. That's lower than most drinks, so it's worth checking your topping prices as well as your base prices.

Putting pearls into BiteMetrics

You buy pearls dry but scoop them cooked, and cooked pearls weigh far more than dry ones, so keep one kind of gram everywhere. The simplest way: enter the bag as you buy it, use dry grams in your recipes (or count servings), and set a waste % for the share of each batch you throw out. The cost of every drink with pearls updates from there. Try it in the free calculator first.