Telling a café your prices are going up, without losing the account

The message that sits in drafts

You have watched your costs climb for months. The tray, the packaging, the thing you buy in every week to make the thing you sell. You know the number on your price list is now wrong, and you know by how much. And still the email to the café does not get written.

It gets put off because it does not feel like a business message. It feels like asking a favour from someone who could just as easily ring another supplier. So you carry the increase yourself, week after week, and the margin you meant to protect quietly disappears into keeping one conversation from happening.

I set a wholesale list when I was growing microgreens and selling to trade, so I know that hesitation. I also spent about a decade before that as a chef, on the other end of these notices, receiving them from producers. The two views are worth holding at once, because the message that feels terrifying to send is usually unremarkable to receive.

A chef is not surprised that prices move

Here is the part that is hard to believe until you have stood on the buying side. A professional buyer expects prices to move.

A chef runs their own numbers. Their suppliers put prices up, their own menu gets re-costed, the cost of a dish is something they watch. When a producer's price shifts, it lands as one more number to fold into a calculation they are already doing. It is not a betrayal. It is Tuesday.

The supplier who never changes a price is the odd one. Not the generous one, the odd one. If your costs are visibly rising and your price has not moved in a long time, a buyer who is paying attention starts to wonder how you are absorbing it and how long you can keep that up. Holding a price too long can read as less stable, not more.

The surprise is what does the damage

The increase is not the thing that hurts an account. The ambush is.

If a new, higher price appears for the first time on an invoice, after the delivery has already been taken and used, you have put the chef in a bad spot. They have costed a dish on the old number. They may have already served it at that cost. Now they are reconciling a bill against a price they did not know about, mid-week, when they have no time to.

Give notice instead. Tell them before the price applies, with enough runway that a kitchen can plan around it: re-cost a dish, adjust a menu price, or simply decide it is fine and move on. The amount of warning matters more than the size of the change. A small rise sprung as a shock does more harm than a larger one a buyer saw coming.

Say the price and the date, and stop

When you do write it, the instinct is to explain. To lay out the supplier costs, the fuel, the packaging, all of it, and to wrap the number in three paragraphs of apology so it lands softly.

Do the opposite. State the new price and the date it starts, plainly, as a decision you have already made. Not a question. Not a request. A fact your customer can plan around.

Something as short as: from the first of next month, this item is going to this price. That is enough. You can add a line of context if it is genuinely useful, but one clear sentence beats three that hedge. The apologetic version is not kinder. It reads as if you are not sure you are allowed to charge it, and that is the doubt that invites a negotiation you did not intend to open.

Change the list, not every conversation

The trap is turning one decision into ten separate conversations. If you raise the price by messaging each account individually, you are effectively negotiating with each of them, one at a time, and the ones who push hardest end up on a different price to the ones who said nothing.

Put the new prices on the wholesale list, dated from when they take effect, and send that. Now the number is a standing fact everyone can see, the same for the account that queries it and the account that does not. It is the difference between "here is my price" and "what can we agree". A single one-page wholesale price list a buyer can order from is the document that carries the change for you, so the email just points at it.

Keep the old version. When someone asks what changed, you want to be able to show the before and after without reconstructing it from memory.

The account that pushes back

Someone will query it. Usually one, sometimes a couple, and they are often the accounts you most want to keep. That is uncomfortable, and it is also fine.

Hold the number for most of them. Then decide, deliberately, whether there is a case for an exception here: real volume, a long relationship, something specific to that account that is worth a different price. If there is, make it on purpose and know why. What you must not do is quietly fold for anyone who complains, because that teaches every account that the list is a starting bid and that the real price is whatever they push back to. Hold it, or make an exception with your eyes open. Not drift.

If you do give one account a different price, that is not the list price. Keep the list as the true number and treat the exception as the exception, or you will lose track of who is paying what.

Read it back as the chef

Before you send it, read your own message as the person receiving it in the middle of service.

They have thirty seconds. Can they see, at a glance, the new price and the date it starts? Is there anything in there they are obliged to reply to before they can get on with their day? If the message ends with a question, or an anxious "let me know if that's okay", you have handed them a task and left the price unsettled.

The version that works gives them the number, gives them the date, and asks nothing back. They read it, note it, and carry on. If any line in your draft is doing the apologising, cut it, and let the price stand as the plain fact it is.

That is the whole job. Not calculating the perfect number, and not a tool that sends it for you. A short message, a dated list, and the decision to treat your own price as something a professional buyer expects to see move.