Charging for Whole Hog

Same as everything else, calculate the cost, and align with my budget. If my FC% is 25%, I divide the cost of the ingredients by 25%, accounting for yield after cooking.

Wicked Smoke BBQ said:

How do you guys that do whole hog price it?

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Heavily! My cost for whole hog is nearly triple what butts cost, I have to get them from a butcher shop that orders them in for me and thaws them which is 30 minutes away. There are no local hog suppliers. The cook time in my Lang can be anywhere from 15-24 hours. We garnish the hogs for display and those items can cost $20-$30 not to mention it's all a lot more work. For those reasons and the fact that I really don't care to do it, we charge dang near double what we do for an event catered with pulled pork cooked from shoulders. I let them know upfront that I can save them money doing butts, however, some still want the whole hog. We do between 2-3 per year on average.

Also note a frozen hog will typically take 3-5 days to thaw in a walk-in or large fridge, possibly affecting your pricing. You off-set smoking them or cooking butterfly over heat? You could smoke a smaller pig for display (plus meat), while getting the bulk of the meat from larger secondary hogs, sides or shoulders cooked separately, if you're doing larger events...helps balance out the yield also.

Sauce Dog said:

Also note a frozen hog will typically take 3-5 days to thaw in a walk-in or large fridge, possibly affecting your pricing. You off-set smoking them or cooking butterfly over heat? You could smoke a smaller pig for display (plus meat), while getting the bulk of the meat from larger secondary hogs, sides or shoulders cooked separately, if you're doing larger events...helps balance out the yield also.

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I could save a small amount of money getting hogs through my food supplier but not much. I'm cooking them in a Lang 84 (offset). In my area a 90 pig will cost you around $1.95lb and a $30-$50 suckling will cost $12 lb through supplier US Foods (my supplier). I prefer not even cook whole hogs and considered taking it off my menu. I then decided to ask myself what price would I cook them for and then simply added that price to my menu. When people ask about it I let them know that I can do pulled pork for them much cheaper, some will go with pulled pork, some will go try to find another person to cook a hog for then and some will book us for the job. I'd say I get two-thirds of the jobs this way in our pulled pork or hog events. If I simply removed it from our menu I wouldn't get any of them because they would never have contacted us.