Why are commercial cheese molds so expensive?

[MarcG]

As the subject says, why are commercial cheese molds so expensive?  $15 CAD for a small piece of plastic with some holes in it. 

[scasnerkay]

Well, if any consolation, you will (hopefully) use the forms a long time!!

[mikekchar]

There are actually a couple of answers.  First the high density food grade plastic that they use for these moulds is much more expensive that your average plastic.  So instead of costing a few cents to make, they cost maybe a dollar or so.  The second reason is that the dies used to make the shape is very expensive.  So potentially $10K.  Since there is a limited market for cheese moulds, if you are going to only sell 10K of them, it basically doubles the cost of production.  This is also true in terms of just running the factory.  There are a couple of companies that make cheese moulds full time, but they basically have  a monopoly because otherwise you need to go with a very small boutique plastics factory where the labour costs are huge.  So you can tack on another dollar or two just because of that.

However, the biggest markup is in distribution and sales.  Imagine you are a home cheese equipment/ingredient store.  How many moulds are you going to sell in a year?  Hundreds?  If you make only $1 per mould, your sweet, sweet profit is hundreds of dollars.  Ready to quit your day job and partake in the green payday of cheese moulds? ;-)  The reality is that you need to feed your family and so you want to take home at least $40K per year.  $10 profit on a $5 mould is pretty much the minimum you can set and not starve to death.  Again, even at that your profit is "thousands", not "tens of thousands".

The same goes for rennet.  You can buy 5 *gallons* (20 litres) of rennet for only $350 at glengarrycheesemaking.us.  And yet, 60 ml will cost you $7.  That's nearly 7x the cost!  The bulk price is probably pretty close to what you can buy from the manufacturer directly, while the small format that we tend to buy is nearly an order of magnitude more expensive.   You can buy moulds from the manufacturers directly, and they are probably about the same: 6-10x cheaper, but you've got to buy 100 times more.

I used to be a member of a homebrew club and because the local homebrew stores refused to deal with the kind of ingredients we wanted (advanced all grain brewing), we were forced to go to the manufacturers.  Because we were a big club, we could do big orders (and in fact, our orders were bigger than some breweries).  We would get together and split everything up.  We could buy malt and and hops at literally 1/10th the price that the homebrew stores charged.  However, we were buying thousands of pounds of grain at a go.  If you want 1 lb of crystal malt from your corner store, it costs them 20 cents, but if they don't charge you $2 they can't make a living.  Just the way of the world, unfortunately.

If you live in a big city, it's definitely an option.  Try to organise a cheese making club and then do big bulk buys.  If you can get 200 people together would will agree to buy a few of the same kind of mould, you can almost certainly buy them from the manufacturer at a very low cost.  Bulk shipping is also quite cheap if you have access to a loading dock (say at somebody's workplace).  I'd love to do it where I live, but I've never met anyone else in the area that is interested in making cheese ;-)

[MarcG]

Good points, thanks to you both!