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

Your soup is the thing friends ask for when someone in the house is sick. Now a neighbor wants a quart of your lentil soup every week, and a coworker wants chicken noodle for a family of five, and you have no idea whether to say $6 or $16.

Most soup pricing advice online gives a range like "$5 to $12 a quart" with made-up example costs and stops there. This guide builds your price from numbers checked on October 7, 2026: what soup shops and farms charge for a quart, what grocery store soup costs, what two common recipes cost you to make, what your time and a rented kitchen add, and what card fees take from each order. It also shows why batch size, more than the recipe, decides whether a meat soup can pay you.

How Much Should You Charge for a Quart of Soup?

We recommend $12 a quart for a meatless soup such as lentil, vegetable or bean cooked in a home kitchen your state permits, and $15 a quart for chicken noodle, another meat soup or any soup made in a rented commercial kitchen. At $12, the ingredients and container for a quart of lentil soup are 24% of your price. At $15, the ingredients and container for chicken noodle are also 24%, but rent and your time take most of what is left, so the meat price has less room to come down.

Here is a price ladder most part-time soup vendors can start from:

Swipe sideways to see every size, cost and kitchen.

Ingredient costs use Taste of Home's Easy Lentil Soup (3 quarts, priced with vegetable broth) and Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup (about 3 1/2 quarts), with every ingredient priced at Walmart.com the morning of this check. Containers are 32-ounce and 16-ounce deli containers with lids bought in packs of 240. Rent is a 4-hour booking at $33 an hour that we estimate turns out 24 quarts, at three or more 4-hour bookings a month (Capital Kitchens' 12-hour monthly minimum is $396 whether you use it or not, so one or two bookings a month cost more per quart). Your time is not in this table; it is covered further down.

Use the ladder as a starting point, then adjust for your town. Three things should move your price up or down:

• Your local soup shop. If it charges $16 a quart, $12 for a homemade quart is an easy yes for your buyers and still pays you well.
• Your buyers. Students and retirees on a budget may buy the $7 pint faster than the quart, while families buy quarts and gallons.
• Your kitchen. A soup you make at home skips rent; the same soup from a rented kitchen needs the higher meat-soup price even with no meat in it. Before you set any price, read our guide to whether you can sell homemade soup in your state, because the legal route you use (home kitchen, rented kitchen or neither) changes your cost more than the recipe does. If you already sell weekly meals, our meal prep pricing guide prices soup the same way as an add-on next to single meals: $12 a quart for a meatless soup from a home kitchen your state allows, and about $15 for a meat soup or any soup cooked in a rented kitchen.

What Do Soup Shops Charge for a Quart Right Now?

Two soup shops and a deli that post their prices online charge $14.00 to $16.00 for a quart of their regular soups and $7.50 to $10.00 for a pint. Lobster, stew and specialty soups run higher: up to $18.95 a quart. These are businesses with storefronts, commercial kitchens and staff, so they set the top of your range, not the floor.

Drag to compare each shop's pint and quart.

Each shop's own menu page was loaded on October 7, 2026; a reload on October 10 showed the same prices. The Kibitz Room, a New York-style deli whose menu sits at greatpastrami.com, lists a $15.00 quart beside each soup and a separate "Quart To Go $14.00" line, so both are shown.

Three things stand out in that table:

• A quart costs less than two pints on two of the three shops' soup lists, and at all three if you count The Kibitz Room's to-go line. New England Soup Factory charges $9.00 for a pint and $15.95 for a quart, so a second pint's worth costs the customer only $6.95. Your price ladder should do the same. The Kibitz Room's soup list prices its quart at exactly two pints ($7.50 and $15.00), though its "Quart To Go" line is $14.00.
• Specialty soups earn $2 to $3 more a quart. New England Soup Factory charges $18.95 for lobster and stew quarts against $15.95 for house soups, and The Kibitz Room charges $17.00 for its Mish Mosh against $15.00.
• Small batches and "when we're out, we close" are normal. Frederick Soups posts four soups a week and closes when they sell out. A home vendor taking pre-orders works the same way, only with the count known before cook day.

What Do Farms and Markets Charge for a Quart of Soup?

Four farms and markets that sell soup by the quart charge $9.99 to $16.99; Farmer Dave's and Green Mountain Girls Farm sell their quarts frozen, and Walt Churchill's Market and Miles Farmers Market sell them hot or chilled. The two farms are the closest match to a part-time home vendor: Farmer Dave's calls its soup small batch, made with much of its own produce, and Green Mountain Girls Farm makes its soup on the farm with farm ingredients. The two markets sell soup by the quart to take home. The lowest price in this group, $9.99, comes from a grocery market with its own kitchen, and the highest, $16.99, from a farm selling chicken and dairy soups as an add-on to its produce shares (CSA).

Drag sideways for every farm's quart price.

We loaded each seller's product page the same day as the shop menus. Miles Farmers Market lists one price range for its quart and gallon sizes, so the $9.99 low end is the smallest size it sells. Walt Churchill's Market shows one $13.99 price next to "8 Quart Minimum Per Soup" and does not say whether it is per quart; we read it as the quart price, because each order is eight 1-quart containers.

Farmer Dave's price list is a useful model for your own. Its butternut, carrot ginger and 10-vegetable soups sit at $12.49 to $14.99, and the other seven, including a vegan coconut cauliflower and every soup with chicken, bacon or dairy, sit at $16.99. So the top price is not only for meat and dairy; a vegan soup carries it too. Still, the $2.00 to $4.50 spread between its cheaper quarts and its top price is about the size of the $3 gap this guide's price ladder sets between meatless and meat soups, which comes mostly from kitchen rent, not ingredients.

How Cheap Is Grocery Store Soup?

A 32-ounce Panera broccoli cheddar soup costs $9.94 at Walmart, and Walmart's own Marketside chicken noodle costs $5.97 for 32 ounces. That is the price some shoppers will hold in their head when they see your $12 quart, so you need to know it even though it is not really your competition. Grocery deli soup is sold off a store shelf under a brand label, Walmart's own Marketside or Panera's. Yours is made that week from a recipe the buyer may already know.

Swipe to compare grocery soup by the ounce.

Prices come from Walmart.com search pages on October 7, 2026. The Pacific Foods per-ounce figure is $7.73 divided by 32 ounces; the rest are Walmart's own unit prices.

Your $12 quart works out to 37.5 cents an ounce, which is about what Panera's 16-ounce cup costs per ounce (37.1 cents) and about 6 cents an ounce more than its 32-ounce size ($12.00 against $9.94 a quart). You are not trying to beat Marketside at 18.7 cents an ounce. You are selling a soup made by a person the buyer knows, in a flavor the grocery case does not carry, and that is why the shop and farm prices above are the better guide.

What Does a Quart of Soup Cost You to Make?

A quart of lentil soup costs $2.66 in ingredients, or $2.86 with a container, and a quart of chicken noodle soup costs $3.46, or $3.66 with a container, at Walmart.com prices on October 7, 2026. We priced two well-known recipes line by line, so you can swap in your own recipe and grocery store and run the same math.

The first recipe is Taste of Home's Easy Lentil Soup, which makes 3 quarts. The recipe calls for chicken stock, and we priced it with vegetable broth instead, because chicken stock may count as a poultry product, and Texas bans poultry products from home kitchens; vegetable broth avoids the question.

Swipe left to see each lentil soup cost.

The second recipe is Taste of Home's Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup, which makes about 3 1/2 quarts from 2 1/2 pounds of bone-in chicken thighs.

Slide sideways for each chicken noodle cost.

We priced every ingredient on Walmart.com on October 7, 2026, using the amount the recipe calls for, not the whole package. The yellow onion was on sale that day at $0.51 (regular price $0.86). Containers are Karat 32-ounce deli containers with lids, $47.99 for 240, or 20 cents each.

Notice that neither soup costs much more than $3.50 a quart in food. That is why soup can look like a high-margin product on paper. Broth is already one of the biggest lines in that food cost, and the real costs beyond food, as the next sections show, are your time, the cooling step and, for meat soups, the kitchen you have to rent.

Why Is Broth One of the Biggest Costs in the Pot?

Store-bought broth is the biggest single cost in the lentil soup and the second biggest in the chicken noodle: $3.00 of the $7.99 lentil batch, or 38%, and $3.75 of the $12.10 chicken batch, or 31%. Lentils, onions and spices are cheap. Liquid by the carton is not. If you want to lower your cost a quart without changing the recipe, broth is where to look first.

Three ways vendors bring the broth cost down:

• Make your own stock from what you already buy. The chicken thighs in this recipe come with bones. Simmer the bones with onion ends, carrot peels and celery tops, and the next batch needs fewer cartons.
• Buy broth by the case or in a larger carton. Walmart's 48-ounce Great Value chicken broth was $2.16 on October 7, 2026, or 4.5 cents an ounce, against 4.7 cents for the 32-ounce carton. That saves only about $2 a month at 50 quarts of chicken noodle.
• Let the vegetables do more of the work. A soup built on roasted vegetables, tomatoes or beans needs less broth for flavor than a clear soup like chicken noodle.

How Much Should Your Time Add to Each Quart?

At $20 an hour, a single 3-quart batch of lentil soup carries $7.22 of your time in every quart before you count cooling and labeling, but a 12-quart batch made in a bigger pot carries about $4.17 with those steps counted. Taste of Home lists the lentil soup at 20 minutes of prep and 45 minutes of cooking, which is 65 minutes for 3 quarts, or $21.67 of your time at $20 an hour. Chopping for four times the recipe does not take four times as long, and the pot simmers on its own.

Our estimate for a 12-quart batch in a 16-quart stockpot is 2 1/2 hours of your time from the first onion to the last labeled container, including cooling. That is $50 at $20 an hour, or $4.17 a quart. Here is where the hours go:

• Prep: about 45 minutes to chop four times the vegetables and measure the lentils and spices.
• Cooking: about 45 minutes, most of it hands-off, which is when you wash up and set out containers.
• Cooling: about 30 minutes of your attention, spread over a few hours, to move the soup into shallow pans or an ice bath and check the temperature.
• Filling and labeling: about 30 minutes for 12 containers, lids, labels and a cold spot in the fridge or freezer.

Batch size is the cheapest raise you can give yourself. At one batch a week, the same $12 quart pays you at least $3 more per quart in time saved when you cook 12 quarts instead of 3. We suggest one cook day a week with a fixed menu of two or three soups, which is easy to do when orders come in before you shop. Our guide to selling soup from home maps that week out, with a sample cook day for two 12-quart pots and a Saturday pickup window that keeps every quart cold.

Can You Sell Homemade Soup From Your Kitchen?

Sometimes: soup needs to be kept hot or cold to stay safe, and of the 12 states in our permission guide, 5 let a home kitchen sell cooked soup with conditions (Texas, Illinois, Utah, Wyoming and North Dakota) while 7 do not under their home food rules (California's county home restaurant permit is the one exception). A cottage food law is your state's list of foods you may make at home and sell without a licensed kitchen, and it usually covers foods that are safe at room temperature, like bread and jam. FDA's 2026 Food Code, the model many state health departments adopt, says a food like soup must be held "At 57°C (135°F) or above" or "At 5°C (41°F) or less".

Our full guide covers 12 states. These are the rules this pricing guide relies on, each read on the agency's own page or the statute first on October 7, 2026 and a second time on October 10. In Texas, the DSHS cottage food production page now allows almost any food from a home kitchen, soup included, as long as it has no meat, poultry or seafood and you register to sell foods that need temperature control. In Illinois, the cottage food section of the statute, 410 ILCS 625/4, permits a soup that leaves out meat, poultry, fish, dairy and eggs, with a local registration fee of no more than $50. In California, the CDPH Approved Cottage Foods list covers only foods that are not potentially hazardous, so cooked soup is out, but it names "Bean soup mixes" and "Vegetable soup mixes". Our Texas cottage food guide covers the rest of the Texas label rules.

Drag the table sideways to see every state's conditions.

Sources read October 7, 2026 and rechecked October 10: the Texas DSHS cottage food page, the Illinois statute, California's Approved Cottage Foods list (last reviewed April 2026) and FDA's 2026 Food Code. Counties and cities can add their own permits, so check with your local agency too.

If you live somewhere not listed here, our guide to which TCS foods cottage food laws allow explains the time and temperature rule that decides it, and the 12-state soup table in our permission guide names each state's agency.

How Much Does Kitchen Rent Add to a Quart?

At $33 an hour, a 4-hour kitchen booking adds $11.00 to every quart if you make 12 quarts, $5.50 if you make 24 and $3.67 if you make 36. Capital Kitchens in Austin, Texas, lists "$33/hr. Flat Rate for Main Kitchen Users" and a "12-hr./month minimum", which is $396 a month whether you use all 12 hours or not. Rent is the cost that decides whether a meat soup can pay, because it does not shrink when your batch does.

Swipe left to see rent, time and what $15 leaves.

Rent comes from the Capital Kitchens rates page, checked October 7, 2026, with the same rates on October 10. These per-quart rent figures assume you use the full 12-hour monthly minimum ($396), which takes three 4-hour bookings; with one or two bookings a month you still pay $396, so rent per quart runs higher. Rates vary a lot by city, so price your own kitchen the same way. The card fee is 2.9% + $0.30 on one $15 quart; on a two-quart order it is less per quart. Making 36 quarts in 4 hours assumes you have the stockpots and the walk-in cooler space to cool that much at once. Capital Kitchens does not provide small wares such as pots and says cold storage may cost extra, so bring your own stockpots and price any cooler space you need if cooling runs past the end of your booking. Each row is figured before rounding, so it can differ by a cent from adding up its rounded parts.

If you have never rented a kitchen, our guide to finding and renting a commissary kitchen covers what the hourly rate usually includes, from storage to insurance requirements. Capital Kitchens, for example, also asks for a certificate showing at least $1,000,000 in general liability insurance, which is one more monthly cost for a meat soup to carry.

How Do You Price a Quart of Soup, Step by Step?

Add up your food, container, time, rent and card fee per quart, then set a price that clears that total and lands between the grocery deli price and your local soup shop's price. For the lentil soup made at home in a 12-quart batch, that is $2.86 + $4.17 + $0.65 = $7.68, so a $12 quart leaves $4.32 after paying yourself $20 an hour, before labels, permits and other overhead. Here are the six steps:

• Price your recipe per quart. Add up what each ingredient costs for the amount you use, divide by the quarts the batch makes, and add the container. Our lentil soup is $7.99 for 3 quarts, or $2.66, plus a $0.20 container.
• Add your time. Multiply your hours from prep to labeled container by the wage you want, then divide by quarts. At $20 an hour, 2 1/2 hours for 12 quarts is $4.17 a quart.
• Add rent if you use a licensed kitchen. Divide the booking cost by the quarts you make in it. A $132 booking that turns out 24 quarts adds $5.50, as long as you book enough sessions to use any monthly minimum (Capital Kitchens' 12-hour, $396 minimum takes three 4-hour bookings).
• Add the card fee. On Homegrown it is 2.9% + $0.30 per order, which is $0.65 on a $12 single-quart order and $1.00 on a $24 two-quart order.
• Check your local range. In our checks, grocery deli soup ran 18.7 to 37.1 cents an ounce, farm quarts $9.99 to $16.99, and soup shop and deli quarts $14.00 to $16.00. Your price should sit inside the farm and shop range.
• Round and build your sizes from the quart. Pick a clean quart price, then set the pint at a little over half of it and the gallon at a little under four times it.

Write the math down once for each soup and keep it next to your recipe. When broth or chicken goes up 20%, you will know in two minutes whether your quart price still works.

How Should You Price Pints, Quarts, Gallons and Bowls?

Price the pint at about 58% of the quart and the gallon at about 3.7 times the quart, which sits inside the range the soup shops we checked use for pints (50% to 62.5%) and just under New England Soup Factory's gallon, the only one listed (3.82 times its quart). A pint at $7 next to a $12 quart makes the quart feel like the smart buy, and that is the size you want most people to take home, because it cuts your container and card fee cost per ounce.

Here is how the two soup shops and the deli set the pint against the quart:

• New England Soup Factory: pint $9.00, quart $15.95, so the pint is 56% of the quart. Its gallon is $60.95, or 3.82 quarts' worth of price.
• Frederick Soups & Comfort Foods: pint $10.00, quart $16.00, so the pint is 62.5% of the quart.
• The Kibitz Room: pint $7.50, quart $15.00 on its soup list, so the pint is exactly half; against its $14.00 quart to go, the pint is 54%.
• This guide's ladder: pint $7, quart $12 (58%); meatless gallon $44 (3.67 quarts), meat gallon $56 (3.73 quarts).

Gallons are a party and freezer size. Miles Farmers Market packs its gallon as four quart containers, which is the easiest way for a home vendor to do it too: one gallon order is four of your normal containers, already labeled, so you do not need a new size or a new label.

Bowls of hot soup are a different business. New England Soup Factory sells a bowl for $7.75 and The Kibitz Room a large bowl for $9.00, but selling hot soup by the bowl at a market is food service, held at 135°F or above, and our permission guide found it usually needs a temporary food establishment permit from your health department, with Wyoming's Food Freedom Act as the exception among the 12 states it checked. Our permission guide covers that route. This guide prices soup to take home cold or frozen. Chili often sells hot by the bowl at suppers and games, and our guide to pricing chili by the bowl and the quart works out an $8 bowl from ground beef at $6.92 a pound.

Should You Sell Soup Fresh, Frozen or as a Dry Mix?

Fresh soup sells best for a pickup within a few days, frozen soup lets you cook once for two or three weeks of orders, and a dry soup mix costs about $3.09 to make, and we suggest about $9 a jar in states that allow it. The price per quart stays about the same for fresh and frozen. What changes is how often you cook and how much you waste.

• Fresh, refrigerated: FDA's Food Code lets a food business hold ready-to-eat soup it made at 41°F or less "for a maximum of seven days", counting the day you made it as day 1. Plan your pickup day close to cook day, and put the use-by date on the label.
• Frozen: Texas's label line already says "keep this food refrigerated or frozen", and freezing gives you room to cook once and sell over several weeks. Leave about an inch of headspace in each quart so the lid does not pop.
• Dry mix: 2 cups of lentils plus the spices from our lentil recipe fit a 16-ounce jar. At $1.62 for the lentils, $0.26 for the spices and $1.21 for a Ball wide mouth jar, that is $3.09. Write the cook directions on the label: add broth, an onion, carrots, celery and a can of crushed tomatoes.

The catalog shows how open the soup lane is: 2 cooked soups in 2,827 products. It also shows how far apart soup prices can sit. Cryptid Kitchen's listing puts its own cost at about $0.75 a serving, or about $3.00 for the 4-serving quart, so a $5.00 quart leaves about $1.55 after a $0.45 card fee. The farm quarts above charge $9.99 to $16.99, so $5.00 is about half of the cheapest farm quarts and well under half of Farmer Dave's $12.49 to $16.99.

What Does a Month of Soup Orders Pay You?

A home vendor selling 48 quarts of lentil soup a month at $12 keeps about $404.59 after food, containers, card fees and the Homegrown plan, which is $40.46 for each of the 10 hours in the kitchen, not counting shopping and pickups. A meat soup from a rented kitchen can pay about $30 an hour, but only when each booking turns out 24 quarts or more and you book at least three sessions a month, so the 12-hour minimum is fully used.

Slide the table sideways for sales, costs and hours.

Every order is two quarts, so card fees are 2.9% + $0.30 on each two-quart order. Food and containers use the per-quart costs above ($2.86 lentil, $3.66 chicken noodle). Rent is $33 an hour with Capital Kitchens' 12-hour monthly minimum. Your hours are our estimate: 2 1/2 hours per 12-quart home batch and the full 4 hours of each booking. The Homegrown plan is $10 a month billed annually. The table leaves out labels, utilities, permit or registration fees, insurance, delivery and any soup that does not sell, so read "left for you" as the money before those costs.

Two lessons sit in that table. First, a meatless soup that your state lets you make at home is the easiest soup to make money on, because you skip rent entirely. Second, a rented kitchen rewards volume: the jump from two bookings to three adds 24 quarts and $258.22 to what you keep, because the 12-hour minimum is already paid.

What Do Ordering Fees Take From a $24 Soup Order?

On a $24 order of two quarts, Homegrown's card processing is $1.00 and Hotplate's default adds a $1.75 fee to your customer's total on top of about the same $1.00 you pay. Over 30 orders a month, covering Hotplate's fee yourself costs $42.50 more than Homegrown on annual billing ($82.38 against $39.88), and Hotplate's default adds $52.50 to what your customers pay.

Move the table left to see every fee on every platform.

Homegrown's signup page, Hotplate's pricing page and Square's fee page were all checked October 7, 2026; each showed the same fees on October 10. Hotplate's own post "What Hotplate does" says "we charge a fee to your customer" and that "80% of Hotplate chefs keep the default as-is"; its pricing page says you can pay the fee yourself or pass it on, "your choice". Card processing here is figured on the $24 price. Square's fee page figures processing on the total with tip and tax, and Hotplate's own example shows $1.27 of processing on a $30.00 subtotal, more than the subtotal alone would give, so on a taxed or tipped order their per-order fee runs a few cents higher than shown. Monthly totals use the exact fee before rounding, so they can differ by a few cents from 30 times the rounded per-order fee.

For a soup vendor, the fee is only part of the choice. Square's in-person rate is the cheapest, but it is a card reader at your table, not a way to collect next week's orders before you buy the broth. The order count before cook day is what keeps a 24-quart batch from becoming 6 quarts of leftover soup.

Take Soup Orders for the Week Before You Cook

Soup only pays when you know how many quarts to make before you shop, and Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually ($12.50 month to month) with no percentage fees beyond standard payment processing, so a vendor selling $576 of soup a month pays nothing beyond the plan and the card fee. You list each soup once, with pint, quart and gallon as size options at their own prices, and customers order and pay ahead on your own storefront link.

Here is how that fits a soup week:

• Order prep time: set how far ahead orders must come in before each pickup date, so a Saturday pickup can close on Thursday night, before you shop.
• Pickup schedule: set your pickup days and time windows by location, such as a porch pickup or a farmers market.
• Sizes as options: a pint at $7, a quart at $12 and a gallon at $44, each with its own price, under one listing.
• Local delivery: set a delivery radius of 1 to 25 miles, a flat delivery fee you keep (minus card processing) and an order minimum.

Compare that to the two ways most home soup cooks start. Taking orders in Facebook or Instagram messages costs nothing, but you end up counting quarts across 20 threads and chasing payments on pickup day. Hotplate works well for limited weekly menus, and its default puts a 5% + $0.55 fee on your customer's subtotal, which is $1.75 on a $24 soup order. On Homegrown, your customer pays $24.00.

Honest bounds: Homegrown does not make soup legal where you live, and it does not run your cooling log or print your safe handling label. Customers create a Homegrown account to place their first order. There is no drops or countdown release feature. Selling by weight is not available, so list fixed sizes. Your storefront is listed on the Homegrown marketplace, but plan on most orders coming from people you send to your own link. If that fits how you want to sell soup, set up your soup menu on Homegrown and take your first week of orders before you buy a single carton of broth.

What Soup Pricing Mistakes Cost Home Cooks the Most?

The most expensive soup mistake is pricing a quart off the ingredients alone: a $5 quart covers $2.86 of food and container but pays almost nothing for the 2 1/2 hours a 12-quart batch takes. These are the mistakes that show up most when you run the numbers above:

• Forgetting your time. At $20 an hour, a single 3-quart batch carries $7.22 of labor in every quart before cooling and labeling. Cook bigger batches or charge more.
• Pricing a meat soup like a meatless one. Chicken noodle from a rented kitchen costs $12.49 a quart before the card fee at 24 quarts a booking. At $12, every quart loses money once you pay yourself.
• Booking short kitchen sessions. Twelve quarts in a 4-hour booking adds $11.00 of rent to each one. Fill the pot.
• Forgetting the broth. Store-bought broth is 31% to 38% of the batch cost in our two recipes. Price it in, or make your own.
• Making soup before the orders come in. Fresh soup has a 7-day window at most under FDA's model code. Cook to your order count, not your hopes.
• Pricing the pint at half the quart. The Kibitz Room's soup list does it, but a pint costs you nearly the same container, label and card fee as a quart. Set it at a little over half.
• Underpricing the gallon. Four of your quart containers is $48 at $12. A $44 gallon is already a good deal; $36 is giving away a quart.

Once your price clears every cost on this list, the next lever is the menu. Two or three soups a week, each in a pint and a quart, is easier to cook, cool and label than six.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should I sell homemade soup for?

Sell homemade soup for about $12 a quart and $7 a pint if it is a meatless soup made in a home kitchen your state allows, and about $15 a quart for chicken noodle or another meat soup made in a rented kitchen. On October 7, 2026, three soup businesses, two shops and a deli, charged $14.00 to $16.00 a quart and four farms and markets charged $9.99 to $16.99. Those ranges are a good check on whatever price your own costs suggest.

How much does it cost to make a quart of soup?

A quart of lentil soup made from the Easy Lentil Soup recipe on Taste of Home costs about $2.66 in ingredients at Walmart.com prices on October 7, 2026, and a quart of chicken noodle costs about $3.46. Add about $0.20 for a 32-ounce deli container with a lid. Broth is the biggest cost after the chicken, so homemade stock lowers both numbers.

How many servings are in a quart of soup?

A quart is 32 ounces, or 4 cups. New England Soup Factory says its quart "feeds 2-3", and Cryptid Kitchen on Homegrown lists 32 ounces of lentil stew as 4 servings. Tell your customers which one you mean on the listing, so they know whether one quart covers dinner for a family of four.

Can I sell soup from my home kitchen?

You can sell soup from a home kitchen in some states, with conditions: 5 of the 12 states in our permission guide allow cooked soup from home, and 7 do not under their home food rules (California's county home restaurant permit is the one exception). Texas lets you sell soup made without meat, poultry or seafood if you register with DSHS to sell foods that need temperature control, and Illinois allows soup with no meat, poultry, fish, dairy or eggs. California's cottage food list covers only foods that are not potentially hazardous, so cooked soup is out, though bean and vegetable soup mixes are named. Verify your state's current rules with the agency that runs your program before you sell.

How much should I charge for a gallon of soup?

Charge about $44 for a gallon of meatless soup and $56 for a gallon of meat soup, which is a little under four times the quart price. New England Soup Factory charged $60.95 for a gallon of its house soups on October 7, 2026. Packing the gallon as four quart containers keeps your labels and containers the same.

Is selling soup profitable?

Selling soup can be profitable, mostly when the soup is meatless and your state lets you make it at home. In our math, 48 quarts of lentil soup a month at $12 leaves about $404.59 after food, containers, card fees and the Homegrown plan ($10 a month billed annually), or about $40 an hour. A meat soup from a rented kitchen paid about $30 an hour at 72 to 96 quarts a month and lost money in small 12-quart bookings.

Related Reading

More guides for soup and prepared food vendors:

• Can You Sell Homemade Soup?: The 12-state rules table, soup mixes, canned soup and hot soup at a market.
• TCS foods and cottage food laws: What makes a food need time and temperature control, and which states allow it.
• How to sell bone broth locally: Licensing, sourcing bones and selling broth by the quart.
• How much to charge for meal prep: Pricing single meals, family trays and soup add-ons in one weekly order.
• How to sell frozen meals locally: Freezing, labeling and pickup for meals you cook ahead.

Pick two soups you already make well, price them with the steps above, and open your first weekly order window. When you know your count before cook day, every quart you make is already sold. Start your Homegrown storefront for $10 a month billed annually and take soup pre-orders this week.