How Much Should You Sell Chow Chow For? (2026 Pricing Guide)

Every fall the same thing happens. Frost is coming, the tomato plants are still loaded with hard green fruit, and somebody says "make chow chow." Now you have a dozen jars of sweet, tangy relish on the counter and a neighbor asking what you want for one.

Pricing advice for chow chow usually stops at a range, with no recipe cost or jar math behind it. This guide builds the price from the ground up: what chow chow sells for on the shelf and from small makers, what a tested recipe costs you jar by jar, how long a batch takes, and what card fees take. Every price was loaded on October 10, 2026.

How Much Should You Sell Chow Chow For?

Sell a pint of chow chow for $10 and a half-pint for $7. That puts a pint at 63 cents an ounce, just above the $9.00 to $9.99 the higher-priced small makers charge online, where the buyer also pays shipping. It also covers your costs with room to pay yourself, as long as your green tomatoes are cheap or free.

Here is a starting price ladder for a part-time chow chow vendor:

Slide the table left to see when each price fits.

The ladder is our recommendation. It is anchored on prices loaded October 10, 2026 (Mrs. Campbell's at $3.97 for 16 ounces on Walmart.com, small makers at $7.00 to $9.99 for 16 ounces on their own sites) and on the cost build further down, which uses the federal August 2026 average of $1.977 a pound for field-grown tomatoes.

Three numbers back the $10 pint:

• The shelf. In a Walmart.com search on October 10, 2026, the one chow chow sold by Walmart.com itself was Mrs. Campbell's at $3.97 for 16 ounces, about 25 cents an ounce. You will never be the cheap jar, so do not try.
• The small makers. Seven small makers and shops we checked, one of them on Homegrown, charged $7.00 to $9.99 for a 16-ounce jar, before any shipping. When a jar is mailed, shipping adds to that price, so $10 at your table is a fair deal for the buyer.
• Your costs and your time. A pint costs $5.52 in supplies when you buy everything, and $3.05 with garden tomatoes. At $10, eight pints earn you $10.37 to $16.96 an hour. At $8 it pays $5.19 to $11.78.

If you still need the basics, like what chow chow is, how to make it safely and where to sell it, start with the companion guide on how to sell relish and chow chow from home. This guide picks up where its pricing section stops: the jar-by-jar math, with today's prices in it.

What Does Chow Chow Cost on the Shelf?

Grocery chow chow ran about 25 cents an ounce at Walmart.com on October 10, 2026. In a Walmart.com search for chow chow relish on October 10, 2026, the only chow chow sold and shipped by Walmart.com itself was Mrs. Campbell's Sweet Chow Chow Relish, 16 ounces for $3.97. Most regular pickle relish in the same search cost the same or less per ounce.

Swipe across to read the whole table.

Loaded from Walmart.com's search results on October 10, 2026, products sold and shipped by Walmart.com and shown in stock. The same search listed other chow chow brands from outside sellers at marked-up prices, such as a 16-ounce Mrs. Renfro's for $14.39, which we left out because they are resale prices, not shelf prices.

What this tells you:

• Shoppers who know chow chow know the grocery price. If someone mentions $4, do not argue. Hand them a taste.
• Your jar is a different product. Grocery chow chow like Mrs. Campbell's is made at factory scale. Yours is a small batch, often with green tomatoes from a named garden, and that is what you are charging for.
• Per ounce is the honest comparison. A $10 pint is 63 cents an ounce, about two and a half times the grocery jar.

What Do Small Chow Chow Makers Charge?

Small makers and specialty shops charged $7.00 to $9.99 for a 16-ounce jar of chow chow on October 10, 2026. The middle of the group sat around $7.49 to $9.00, and one Georgia jam maker charged $7.00 for an 8-ounce jar.

Here is the full list, with what each jar holds:

Swipe the table to see each maker's price per ounce.

We loaded every page on October 10, 2026. Online prices are before shipping, so a buyer pays more than the listed price to get a jar delivered. Three of these are shops that name the maker on the page: Das Jam Haus sells The Relish Barn's chow chow, Piedmont Farm and Garden sells Smokey Mountain Honey House chow chow, and The Bend Mercantile sells Lady May's. Lady May's showed as sold out when we checked again on October 12, 2026.

Mor-Lyn-Del Farm's setup is worth copying. Instead of 13 separate listings, it sells one Canned Goods listing with a flavor menu, and every pint is the same $8. Its Sweet Southern Chow Chow sits in that menu next to its pickles, salsas and yellow relish. A customer picks one flavor or several, and you only manage one price.

Which Tested Recipe Should You Price From?

Price from a recipe that has been tested for home canning, because that recipe also sets your jar size, your yield and your cost. The National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia publishes two that make a classic Southern-style chow chow, both adapted from the USDA's Complete Guide to Home Canning (2015 revision).

• Pickled Green Tomato Relish. 10 pounds of small, hard green tomatoes, 1.5 pounds each of red and green bell peppers, 2 pounds of onions, sugar, vinegar, yellow mustard and a little cornstarch. It makes 7 to 9 pints and is tested for pint jars. The mustard gives it a yellow color and a tangy bite.
• Piccalilli. Green tomatoes, red and green peppers, onions and 7.5 cups of cabbage, with brown sugar and whole pickling spice. It makes 9 half-pints, is tested for half-pints or pints, and needs the vegetables to sit in salt water for 12 hours before cooking.

Both are processed in a boiling-water canner: 5 minutes at up to 1,000 feet of elevation, 10 minutes from 1,001 to 6,000 feet, and 15 above that. Use the recipe exactly as written. The amount of vinegar against the vegetables is what makes chow chow safe on a shelf, so adding extra cabbage or cutting the vinegar to stretch a batch is not an option.

Texas, for one, lists the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning as a recipe source for pickled cottage foods on its cottage food production page. If your family recipe is not on a tested list, price and sell from a tested one, and keep the family version for your own table.

What Does One Pint of Chow Chow Cost to Make?

One pint of the tested green tomato relish costs about $5.52 to make when you buy every ingredient, and about $3.05 when the green tomatoes come from your garden. The tomatoes are the single biggest line: $19.77 of a $44.17 batch.

Here is the full batch of Pickled Green Tomato Relish, priced on October 10, 2026:

Drag the table sideways for the cost of each ingredient.

Supply prices loaded from Walmart.com on October 10, 2026, products sold by Walmart.com. Walmart does not list a size for its bell peppers, so we counted a large pepper at 164 grams, the USDA FoodData Central weight for a large sweet pepper, which works out to about 2.8 peppers to a pound. Sugar uses the USDA cup weight. The canning salt weight is our estimate, based on USDA's figure for table salt. The batch is figured at 8 pints, the middle of the recipe's 7 to 9. Each row is rounded to the cent, so the rows add up to $44.18 ($24.41 with garden tomatoes), a cent more than the totals, which use the unrounded costs.

A few things to notice in that table:

• The jar is the second-biggest cost. At $1.12 with its lid, it costs more per pint than the red peppers, which come to 79 cents.
• Sugar, vinegar, salt, mustard and cornstarch barely register. Together they come to about $2.74 for the whole batch, or 34 cents a pint.
• Reused jars still need new lids. If you buy lids alone and reuse clean jars, your jar line drops, but count the lids honestly.

Why Do Green Tomatoes Decide Your Price?

Green tomatoes are 45% of the cost of a bought-everything batch, so where they come from decides whether $10 a pint pays you about $17 an hour or about $10 an hour. With garden tomatoes, a pint costs $3.05. With bought tomatoes at the federal average, it costs $5.52.

Making chow chow from the last green tomatoes before frost is still the best way to price it. A home gardener with 10 pounds of green fruit on the vine in October is holding about $20 worth of ingredients for free.

Ways to get green tomatoes cheaply:

• Your own plants in the last two weeks before frost. Pick every hard green tomato that will not ripen in time.
• A farmer clearing their field. Ask whether they will sell end-of-season green tomatoes by the box before frost takes them.
• Friends with gardens. Trade a finished jar for 10 pounds of their green tomatoes. One jar for a batch's worth of fruit is a good trade for both of you.

If you have to buy every pound at grocery prices, $10 a pint still pays you about $10.37 an hour. If that is too thin for you, $12 a pint pays about $15.55 an hour, or make the cabbage-heavy piccalilli instead, which uses far fewer tomatoes per jar.

What Does a Half-Pint Cost From the Piccalilli Recipe?

A half-pint of tested piccalilli costs about $2.69 to make with bought tomatoes, or $2.17 with garden tomatoes. The recipe leans on cabbage, which is cheap, so the tomato source matters much less here than in the green tomato relish.

Scroll right to see what each piccalilli ingredient costs.

Prices from Walmart.com on October 10, 2026 (brown sugar is Dixie Crystals, 32 ounces for $2.87; pickling spice is Great Value, 1.5 ounces for $2.54; half-pint jars are a 12-pack of Ball 8-ounce jars for $11.98). Cup-to-weight conversions use USDA FoodData Central: chopped cabbage 89 grams a cup, chopped green tomato 180 grams a cup, chopped onion 160 grams a cup, chopped bell pepper 149 grams a cup, packed brown sugar 220 grams a cup. Walmart.com sells cabbage by weight, at 78 cents a pound. The spice weight is our estimate.

The half-pint jar is the biggest single cost here, at $1.00 each. That is why a half-pint has to sell for more per ounce than a pint.

How Long Does a Batch Take, and What Does It Pay You?

A batch of 8 pints takes about 3 hours of hands-on work, by our estimate, and at $10 a pint it pays you $10.37 to $16.96 an hour once supplies and card fees are paid. The low number is with bought tomatoes, the high one with garden tomatoes.

Most of that time is chopping 15 pounds of vegetables, then simmering, filling jars and running the canner. A food processor cuts the chopping a lot. The piccalilli takes about 2.5 hours of hands-on work across two days, plus the 12-hour salt soak in between.

Here is what an 8-pint batch pays at different prices, figuring the 2.9% + $0.30 card fee on every jar:

Swipe left to compare bought and garden tomatoes.

"You keep" is batch sales minus the $44.17 batch cost (or $24.40 with garden tomatoes) minus card fees, figured as if every jar is its own card sale. Hours use our 3-hour estimate. Booth fees, gas and your canner are not included.

The table makes the case for $10 better than any rule of thumb. At $8 with bought tomatoes you are working for about $5 an hour. At $10 with garden tomatoes you clear almost $17.

Should You Sell Pints or Half-Pints?

Sell both if you can, with pints at $10 and half-pints at $7. The half-pint is the jar a curious shopper buys to try chow chow for the first time. The pint is the jar your regulars buy once they know they love it on beans and greens.

At $7, a batch of 9 piccalilli half-pints keeps $34.27 with bought tomatoes, net of jars and card fees, or $13.71 an hour for 2.5 hours. At $6 it keeps $25.53, or $10.21 an hour.

You can put either recipe in half-pints. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says process times for half-pint and pint jars are the same, so half-pints of the green tomato relish get the same time as its pints. Going smaller is fine; never put a tested recipe in a jar bigger than the sizes it lists.

Can You Sell Chow Chow Where You Live?

It depends on your state, because chow chow is a canned pickled vegetable, and states treat those very differently from jam or cookies. Some allow it from a home kitchen with conditions, and some do not allow it at all under their cottage food law. Check before you set a price, because a price for a jar you cannot legally sell is worth nothing.

Three examples, each from the state agency's own page on October 10, 2026:

• Texas allows it, from a listed recipe source and with a batch number. Texas's cottage food rules require a unique number for each batch of pickled fruit or vegetables on the label, and list the recipe sources for pickled foods, such as the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning. To use a recipe source that is not on the list, you submit it to the state for review first.
• Wisconsin allows it, in limited places. Under Wisconsin's home-canned foods rules, pickled vegetables must have a pH of 4.6 or lower, sales are capped at $5,000 a year per person, and you can sell only at community or social events, flea markets or farmers markets in Wisconsin. Sales from your home, wholesale, on consignment, over the internet or out of state are not permitted.
• Washington does not allow it from a cottage kitchen. Washington's cottage food page lists "canned pickled products such as corn relish, pickles, sauerkraut" among the foods its cottage food law does not cover.

These are three states out of fifty, and the rules change. Check with your state agriculture or health department before you sell a jar. For a state-by-state look at jarred pickled foods, see can you sell homemade pickles, which covers the same acidified-food rules that apply to chow chow.

Should Hot Chow Chow Cost More Than Mild?

No, price hot and mild chow chow the same. Das Jam Haus, one of two small sellers we found offering both, charged $7.00 for its hot pint and $7.00 for its mild chow chow on October 10, 2026. Price them the same so the shopper picks by taste, not by price. Twins Organic Produce lists its hot chow chow at $8.95 and says a mild version exists, but posts no mild price. Keep hot and mild on one listing with a flavor menu, the way Mor-Lyn-Del Farm does with its pickles and relishes. Do not swap jalapenos into a tested sweet-pepper relish on your own. Make hot chow chow only from a tested recipe that calls for hot peppers, and follow it exactly as written.

What does justify a higher price:

• A smaller jar. Per ounce, a half-pint should cost more than a pint, because the jar costs nearly as much.
• Costlier produce. A batch made with bought tomatoes in early summer costs more than one made from end-of-season garden fruit. If your cost goes up, your price can too.
• A gift pack. Two pints with a ribbon at $19 is a holiday purchase, not a condiment purchase.

What does not justify a lower price is "it is just relish." Your regulars are paying for the green tomatoes you saved from frost and the afternoon you spent chopping them.

What Do Card Fees Take From a $10 Jar?

Card and platform fees take 41 cents to $1.40 from a $10 pint, depending on how the customer pays. The low end is a card reader at your table. The high end is Etsy, before you count what it costs to ship a glass jar.

Here is the full fee stack on one $10 pint, and on a month of 50 pints:

Swipe across for every fee in the stack.

We checked every fee on each company's own page (findhomegrown.com/signup, Square's fee help page, and Etsy's Fees and Payments and Etsy Payments policies) on October 10, 2026. Card processing is figured on the $10 price; on a total that includes tax or shipping it runs a few cents higher, and Etsy's 6.5% also applies to the shipping you charge. The card reader row assumes you already own a reader. Etsy advertising fees are not included.

Two ways to keep fees small on chow chow:

• Sell two jars on one payment. The fixed part of a card fee, 15 or 30 cents, is charged once per payment, not once per jar.
• Take cash too. Cash has no fee. Keep the card reader for everyone else, since a lost $10 sale costs much more than 41 cents.

If you are thinking about Etsy for chow chow, Homegrown's breakdown of Etsy fees for food sellers shows every line, including what the 6.5% does to the shipping you charge on a heavy jar.

Where Should Your Chow Chow Price List Live Between Markets?

Chow chow is a seasonal batch, so it helps to take orders before the jars are even filled. When your green tomatoes come in all at once in October, you want a place where regulars can see your price, pick hot or mild, and pay ahead for pickup.

Homegrown costs $10 a month billed annually ($12.50 billed monthly) with no percentage fees beyond standard payment processing. You can list chow chow the way Mor-Lyn-Del Farm does, as one listing with a flavor menu where every pint is the same price, and customers pay when they order. Orders land in your dashboard with a pickup time, from your porch, your farm stand or your market booth, and online orders update your stock automatically so you do not sell jar 13 of a 12-jar batch. Sales tax is calculated in the background, and you get a printable QR code for your booth sign so market shoppers can reorder in November.

Compare that with the tools a chow chow vendor usually tries first:

• Etsy takes about $1.40 from a $10 jar before shipping, and a heavy glass jar is costly to mail.
• Square is cheaper per payment at your table (41 cents a jar), and its online checkout costs 63 cents a jar with no monthly plan. It works well for the table.
• Facebook messages and texts cost nothing, but you track who wants mild, who wants hot and who has paid across a dozen threads.

What Homegrown does not do: it is set up for pickup and local delivery, so it is not the tool for mailing jars to another state. It does not check whether your state allows home-canned chow chow; that part is on you. Customers create a Homegrown account to place a first order. There is no timed drop or countdown release. Your storefront is listed on Homegrown's local marketplace, but plan on most orders coming from people you send to your own link.

What Should You Charge a Store for Chow Chow?

If a store offers $6 for a pint you sell for $10, which is 60% of your retail price, only take that deal when your tomatoes cost little or nothing. At $6, a pint made with bought tomatoes leaves you 48 cents before you pay yourself. With garden tomatoes it leaves $2.95.

Wholesale makes sense for chow chow in one case: you have a big end-of-season pile of free green tomatoes and more jars than your market table can sell before spring. A farm store or a country store with a pickle shelf can move a case for you while you are not standing there.

Before you agree to a wholesale price:

• Check that the store can buy from you at all. Wisconsin does not permit wholesale of home-canned foods, so verify your own state's rule before you quote a store a price.
• Sell by the case. A case of 12 pints at $6 is $72 in one trip, not 12 trips.
• Keep your retail price at $10. A store that sells your jar for $8 undercuts you at your own table.

How Do You Turn a Fall Glut Into a Season of Sales?

Make chow chow in the two weeks before frost, then sell it from November through spring as a pantry jar. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says to store sealed jars in a clean, cool, dark, dry place, best between 50 and 70 degrees, and to can no more than you will use within a year. So you do not have to sell the whole batch in one weekend.

• Count your green tomatoes. Every 10 pounds is one batch of 7 to 9 pints of the tested green tomato relish.
• Take orders before you cook. Post your price, hot and mild, and a pickup date. Regulars who order first tell you how many batches to make. Online pre-orders and porch pickup are not allowed everywhere. Wisconsin, for one, limits home-canned sales to markets and events, so check your state first.
• Buy jars and peppers for the orders, plus a little extra. At $1.12 a pint jar, extra jars are the cost you feel most.
• Can, label and number each batch. Write a batch number on every label, which Texas requires for pickled cottage foods, and add the date, which helps you anywhere.
• Fill the pre-orders first, then bring the rest to market. Open one half-pint for tastes at the table.
• Keep it listed through the winter. Chow chow goes on pinto beans, greens and hot dogs year round, so keep selling after the market season ends.

The pre-order step is where most of the money is. A batch that is already sold before you open the canner pays the full hourly rate from the table above, $10.37 with bought tomatoes or $16.96 with garden ones, not that number minus the jars you carried home unsold. If you want regulars to reserve their jars before you cook, a Homegrown storefront lets them pick hot or mild and pay ahead for a pickup day, so your batch count comes from real orders.

What Pricing Mistakes Do New Chow Chow Vendors Make?

The most common mistake is pricing chow chow like grocery relish. At $5 a pint, a vendor who buys their tomatoes loses about 97 cents a jar once card fees and the jar are paid. At $6 they barely break even.

• Pricing at $5 because the grocery jar is $4. Your pint costs $3.05 to $5.52 to make. With bought tomatoes, a $5 price loses about 97 cents a jar after the card fee. With garden tomatoes it leaves about $1.50.
• Forgetting the jar and lid. At $1.12 for a pint jar and $1.00 for a half-pint jar, the jar is one of your biggest costs.
• Pricing on free tomatoes, then buying them. A price that only works with garden tomatoes stops working the year your plants fail. Recheck the math with bought tomatoes.
• Changing the tested recipe to make it cheaper. More cabbage or less vinegar changes the acid balance that makes chow chow shelf safe.
• Charging extra for hot. Keep hot and mild at one price so the choice is about taste, the way Das Jam Haus charged $7.00 for its hot pint and $7.00 for its mild chow chow on October 10, 2026.
• Wholesaling before your table sells out. At $6 a store pint, bought tomatoes leave you 48 cents a jar.

For the general method behind all of this, Homegrown's guide on how to price food products for a farmers market walks through cost, time and markup for any product on your table. When your price is set, put your chow chow on a Homegrown storefront and take this fall's orders before the first frost.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should I sell a pint of homemade chow chow for?

Sell a pint of homemade chow chow for $10. On October 10, 2026, a pint of the USDA-tested green tomato relish cost about $5.52 to make with bought tomatoes and $3.05 with garden tomatoes, jar and label included. At $10, an 8-pint batch pays you about $10.37 to $16.96 an hour after supplies and card fees.

How much does it cost to make a jar of chow chow?

A pint costs $3.05 to $5.52 in supplies, depending on whether you grow or buy the 10 pounds of green tomatoes in a batch. A half-pint of the tested piccalilli recipe costs $2.17 to $2.69. The glass jar with its lid is $1.12 for a pint and $1.00 for a half-pint, which makes it one of the largest costs in every jar.

Is $10 too much for a jar of chow chow?

No. Ten dollars for 16 ounces is 63 cents an ounce, close to the $9.00 to $9.99 the higher-priced small makers charged online on October 10, 2026, and their buyers pay shipping on top. It is about two and a half times the grocery jar, which ran $3.97 for 16 ounces at Walmart.com, but a local small-batch chow chow sells to a different shopper.

Can I sell chow chow from my home kitchen?

It depends on your state. Texas allows pickled vegetables as a cottage food when the recipe comes from a source the state approves, such as the USDA's home canning guide, with a batch number on the label. Wisconsin allows home-canned pickled foods only at certain venues and up to $5,000 a year. Washington's cottage food law does not cover canned pickled products like corn relish. Verify your state's current rules before you sell.

How much should I charge for a half-pint of chow chow?

Charge $7 for a half-pint, made from a tested recipe such as the USDA piccalilli. Half-pints use the same process time as pints, so the green tomato relish works in half-pints too. A half-pint costs about $2.69 to make with bought produce, and at $7 a batch of nine pays about $13.71 an hour. Jill's Jams and Jellies in Dahlonega, Georgia charged $7.00 for its 8-ounce chow chow on October 10, 2026.

Is selling chow chow profitable?

It is profitable when your green tomatoes are cheap. At $10 a pint with garden tomatoes, an 8-pint batch leaves about $50.88 once supplies and card fees are covered. With every tomato bought at the federal average price, the same batch leaves about $31.11, so it pays to make it from end-of-season garden fruit.

Related Reading

More relish, jar and pricing guides for small vendors:

• How to Sell Relish and Chow Chow From Home: what chow chow is, how to make it safely and where to sell it.
• How Much Should You Sell Pickles For?: the pint-jar math for dill, bread and butter and specialty pickles.
• How Much Should You Sell Salsa For?: another canned vegetable where one ingredient sets the price.
• Where to Sell Pickles: markets, farm stands and stores for jarred pickled foods.
• Cottage Food Labeling Requirements: what has to go on the label of every jar.