The first thing I did with each idea was open a spreadsheet.
I wanted to sell sfra cakes to shops. I went to the supermarket, bought ingredients, baked, and counted how many cakes a given amount made. Then I worked out a cost per unit from what each cake actually took.
That part I got right. It was also the easiest part of the whole problem, and I mistook getting it right for having checked the idea.
What the sheet said
A cake cost me about 10 shekels in ingredients. A realistic price to a shop was about 20.
Labour was not free, so I costed it separately. It took me two hours to make five cakes. Someone who knew what they were doing would charge at least 60 shekels an hour, more likely 70 to 80, and could make about ten an hour. That put labour at roughly 7 to 8 shekels a cake.
On paper there was still a margin. The sheet did not have a line for fuel, and that was not the line that mattered.
What the sheet left out
I had no car and no driving licence. So I tried delivering on foot, pushing the cakes in a cart.
The heat ruined them. A product that is fine in the kitchen and spoiled at the shop door has no unit cost worth calculating, because the unit never arrives.
Buying ingredients at industrial scale would have fixed the margin and not the problem: it needs money up front, and it still needs a way to move the cakes. I stopped.
The cookie, and about 150 doors
The next idea was smaller on purpose: chocolate chip cookies. Without a licence for shops, I would sell door to door. The sheet said that even paying someone to bake them, a cookie could sell for 4 shekels and leave one shekel of profit after VAT.
I baked one batch, twelve cookies, and went to test whether anyone wanted one. I went through two whole buildings, about 150 apartments.
People did not buy. Part of that was me: a twenty-year-old at your door holding an unwrapped cookie is strange, and I knew it. That was the risk of the test, and the point of it. I wanted to know whether there was any demand for a chocolate chip cookie at your door before I spent more on making them.
What the refusals measured
Most refusals were politeness. “I have no small change.” “Sorry, I don’t eat sweets,” said next to a bowl of sweets on the table. Those told me nothing about cookies and something about how people say no to a stranger.
A few were real, and they were the useful part of the day: kashrut, allergies, and people who genuinely ate healthily. And one question kept coming back: where is this made, and who made it?
That question is not about price at all. It is about provenance and trust, which a home-baked, unwrapped product cannot answer at a front door, however good the margin.
The question I should have asked first
The same day I spoke to the owner of a bakery, to ask how many cookies he sells in a day. That conversation is where I understood I would also need Ministry of Health approval, among other things. I stopped that idea too.
Both times the cost per unit was correct and beside the point. The expensive parts sat outside the sheet: getting the product to the buyer intact, being trusted to sell it, and being permitted to. A spreadsheet answers the question you give it. It cannot tell you which question decides the business.