The Business of Culinary Herbs

Shared From MOTHER EARTH NEWS  Written By: MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors

This is one of the most important phases of the herb business and offers good opportunities for the beginner. The herbs that are dried and packaged are numerous, but for the beginner we recommend starting with the most popular varieties. They are summer savory, rosemary, sage, French thyme and, to a lesser extent, the mints and French tarragon.

Marketing Dried Culinary Herbs

Under this heading will come both the dried seeds and foliage. This field is immense and wide open for the enterprising small acreage owner. The business is so profitable that many of the large food wholesale concerns have gone into it on a large scale. Through powerful, well-financed national advertising, these large distributing companies have created considerable interest in herbs and have increased their consumption many times. This of course gives the small grower a free ride with his product. He does not have to embark on the expensive business of educating the public. The big outfits have done it for him, and all he has to do now is to get in there and produce for a waiting market As an example of the profits that exist in this business, we recently found that a 25¢ package of sweet basil, selling in supermarkets contained approximately 1/4 ounce of this herb. One single basil plant will produce four times this amount of dried leaf material and 15,000 plants can be grown on an acre.

Packaging of Dried Culinary Herbs

The small grower can use several methods of packaging his herbs, depending on the type of market he is aiming for. In the high priced specialty food stores catering to an elite trade, you will have to use distinctively shaped jars with artistically designed labels. This is a difficult market to get into because the bigger companies have pretty well covered these stores. Another reason that a beginner should not go after the fancy high priced stores is that you will have an enormous initial investment tied up in jars and specially printed labels. For the beginner we recommend putting herbs into small pliofilm or cellophane bags that can be heat-sealed and stapled to heavy cardboard display cards. This inexpensive packaging, if neatly assembled, is effective and gives the smaller stores an opportunity to offer whole leaf herbs of a fancy grade. Usually five different herb varieties are stapled in rows of ten on a 12 inch by 18 inch display card. Each small bag of herbs should contain approximately 1/4 ounce of herb material. The display card should have a bold heading, attractively printed, stating something like “Fresh Culinary Herbs”. A good heading we saw recently said, “Oregon Grown Herbs Make Food Taste Better”. With a little thought you may come up with a small printed sheet of recipe suggestions for that specific plant.

How to Price Your Product

A display card carrying 50 bags of herbs will sell well to the consumer at 25¢ a package. The merchant will expect a one-third mark-up on such a display. On this specialized item you might have to give some of the bigger stores a forty percent mark-up. For instance, a card holding fifty packets of herbs will retail out to a total of $12.50. If a merchant makes 40% on such a card, it should be sold to him for $7.50.

On an acre of land you should be able to produce enough herbs to fill at least one thousand display cards. This means a gross return of $7500 an acre when the herbs are dried and so merchandised. This figure is arrived at by estimating that an acre will produce 1000 pounds of dried herb material. Since each display card of fifty quarter-ounce packets takes less than one pound of herbs, the acre will produce more than one thousand cards. From the $7500 there must be deducted expenses of about 35% of the gross return. That will leave a net profit of $5000 an acre. Remember that this can be considered only as an estimated profit. There are several factors that could make it go up or down. Keep yourself flexible and do the things necessary to fit in with your local conditions. If a display card with 50 packets of herbs is too big for some of the stores you call on, then reduce it to twenty-five packets of dried herbs. Of course, when display cards are reduced in size you should not give the merchant more than a thirty-three percent mark-up.

To continue reading about Herbs as a Homestead Business, check out Start an Herb Business on MOTHER EARTH NEWS.