Boxed Mac and Cheese

Boxed Mac and Cheese! We used to sell fresh hot baked mac and cheese casseroles made with creamy cashew cheese béchamel at our café, and everyone was so into it that we started selling just the sauce, to stash in your freezer whenever you need a creamy sauce made with real, high-quality, always-vegan ingredients. Now we’ve taken it a step further and put that delicious (and uh, suuuuuper labor-intensive) cheese sauce in our freeze dryer so we can offer it in handy packet form along with wheat or gf noodles. Our besties hemlock printers printed up a super eco package that Ericka designed and I (Lagusta, hiiiiii) wrote the letters for. 

HOW CUTE ARE THEY! They’re $14 a box and I’m going to break down why.

Each box is 2.5 servings. $5.60 a serving.

I know that the supermarket non-vegan boxed mac is a lot cheaper. It’s, in fact, about the price of our boxes. Like, just the boxes. What the boxes cost us. They cost us about $1.75 each. All recycled, all eco inks. $1.75 each. The cheese sauce is about $4.50 of our cost. All high quality everything, a million ingredients, lots of $$$ cashews, in a compostable pouch. The pasta’s only about .40 for the wheat one, almost $1 for the gluten-free. But we’re pricing them the same & hoping mostly wheat ones sell & it all balances out. Labor and overhead adds at least another dollar. If we truly doubled our cost like you’re supposed to they would be $15.50 and $16.50  but come on. So $14. Maybe this will take off, we’ll get huge and can buy a pallet of mac and cashews, order 10,000 boxes at a time. Dunno if we want that, but it would reduce costs a little. Until then, here we are, we’re awfully proud of these boxed mac and cheese babes.