The real cost of a loaf of bread

I started milling my own flour because I didn't consent to taking folic acid.

In August 2023 it became law that non-organic wheat flour used for bread in New Zealand must be fortified with it. Every sandwich loaf, every toast loaf, the cheap white and the dear grain. I've written about the folic acid question already, why it's there, what the synthetic form actually is, and the trade-off nobody voted on, so I won't relitigate it here. The short version: there's a real public-health case for it, and there's also the plain fact that it's a medication delivered through a staple food with no way to opt out except to leave the category. Organic flour is the one legal exemption.

That's the door I walked through. I bought a mill. And then, because I was already reading labels, I noticed folic acid was the least interesting thing on them.

A loaf of Molenberg Original, from the manufacturer's own listing: water, wheat flour, kibbled grains, oat bran, yeast, wheat gluten, iodised salt, canola oil, soy flour, emulsifier (481), acidity regulators (263, 330), vitamin (folic acid), processing aids (wheat).

The loaf I make: flour, water, salt, a bit of starter.

I'll come back to that gap in a piece of its own, because the emulsifiers and preservatives that fill the space between those two lists deserve more room than I can give them here. For now I'll just say that most of what's on the industrial label is buying back something the industrial process removed. Softness that time provides for free. Shelf life that a freezer provides for free. Hold that thought.

Because the thing I actually want to show you is the number, and the number surprised me.

I assumed I was paying more

When I started, I assumed I was buying a nicer loaf at a worse price. A small organic luxury chosen over the cheap option. That's the trade everyone assumes you're making. It's wrong.

I buy my wheat from Scotsburn Farm in Methven, certified organic, and mill it myself on a stone mill from Flour Power in Christchurch. A 25kg bag is $78, freight to me about $25, so the grain lands at $103, a little over four dollars a kilo. My loaf takes 750g of flour. Milling whole grain loses nothing, so that's 750g of grain, about $3.09 of it. Add salt, a little starter flour, and the power to run the oven, and a finished 1,300g loaf costs me somewhere near $3.50.

But a supermarket loaf is around 750g and mine is 1,300g, so to compare honestly you have to shrink mine to their size. Normalised to 750g, my loaf costs about $2.02 in ingredients.

Then there's the mill. If you're starting out you'd buy the most cost-effective decent one, and in New Zealand that's around $920. There's no budget tier for a good stone mill, worth knowing before you go hunting for a $200 shortcut that doesn't exist. I bake about 150 loaves a year and give most of them away. Spread a $920 mill across ten years of that, and it adds about 35 cents to each 750g loaf.

Here's the table.

Certified organic, home-milled sourdough, with the price of a German mill folded in, costs less than the cheapest budget white loaf in the supermarket. On ingredients alone it beats everything. Against a real supermarket sourdough it's a third of the price.

The mill pays for itself, too. At my volume I make close to 200kg of bread a year for around $520 all in. The same weight in Molenberg would run about $1,200. The mill clears its own cost against ordinary bread inside about sixteen months, and against supermarket sourdough in under a year. After that it just quietly hands me a few hundred dollars a year I used to leave in the bread aisle.

The forty-five minutes

There's a time cost and I'll be honest about it. Milling, mixing, folding, shaping, baking: maybe forty-five minutes of hands-on work across a weekend, and that makes four loaves. Call it eleven minutes a loaf, and most of the rest of it is just waiting.

If you insist on costing that at an hourly rate, fine. But nobody bills themselves for the hours they spend fishing and then decides the snapper worked out dearer than the shop. The fishing is the point. So is this. Some of the forty-five minutes is the reason to do it, not the price of it.

I went looking for one vitamin I hadn't agreed to. I found a loaf built out of substitutes for time, and a cheaper, better one waiting on the other side of a bag of wheat.

Two dollars and two cents.

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