What logo printed takeout bags cost a Bay Area restaurant, all in.

Your bag is a line on every ticket

Bay Area owners already know what each order costs them. There's the food, the box, the cup, the napkins, and on app orders, the cut the delivery platform takes. Rent sits behind all of it, and nobody has to tell a Bay Area owner how big that check is. The bag belongs on that same list.

So skip the question "how much is one bag?" and ask a better one: how much does my bag add to each ticket after every charge is paid? One order, one bag. Whatever a bag really costs you is what it adds to every pickup and every delivery.

That number is easy to find, but only if you count all of it. Most quotes leave pieces out.

Three charges a quote can hide

When a print shop sends a price, check for these three before you compare it to anything.

• The setup charge. It goes by many names: art fee, plate fee, setup fee. It's common to see $150+ just to get your logo ready, sometimes again on each reorder.
• The minimum run. Many shops won't print fewer than a few thousand bags. That's a lot of paper to pay for up front.
• Freight. Paper is heavy, and getting a pallet to a kitchen in the Inner Sunset or a strip mall in Fremont can cost extra on top of the quote.

None of these are wrong for a big chain. For an independent kitchen paying Bay Area rent, they are the difference between a smart buy and money sitting in a storage room.

The math, in one line

Take the total of your first invoice, setup and freight included. Divide it by how many bags come in the box. That's your true price per bag, and it's also what each order pays for its bag.

Here's ours. A Subscribe & Save box is $85 for 150 bags with your logo printed. Setup is $0. Shipping is free. Nothing else gets added, so each order pays 56.7¢ for its bag. Take the two box bundle on Subscribe & Save and it drops to 50.7¢. A one-time box comes out to 78.3¢, and a one-time bundle to 64¢.

Now try it on a quote with a $150+ setup charge and a short run. Spread that charge across a few hundred bags and the setup alone can add more to each ticket than our whole printed bag.

Next to rent and app fees, the bag is the cheap part

Several of the big delivery apps got their start here, and plenty of Bay Area kitchens now send a big share of their food out through them. Those platforms keep a cut of each order, and you can't print your name on their fee. You can print it on the bag.

The bag is the one piece of a delivery order you fully control. It's what the customer touches first when the driver leaves. A plain sack tells them nothing. A bag with your logo tells them who cooked dinner, so next time they might order from you directly or walk in.

The same goes for rent. You pay for every square foot, so the space your supplies take up costs money too. A pallet of printed bags in the back hallway of a small Chinatown kitchen is rent you're paying to store paper.

Costs that never show on the invoice

Some of what a bag costs you is never written down. It still comes out of the same bank account.

• Money tied up in cases. Paying for a year of bags at once is cash that can't go to payroll, produce or a broken walk in this month.
• Space you rent. Bay Area kitchens are tight. Every stack of cases pushes out something more useful.
• A logo that changes. A new name, a new phone number or a second spot in Oakland means every old bag in storage is out of date.
• Damp air. Fog rolls in off the ocean in parts of San Francisco. Paper that sits for months in a cool, damp back room can soften. Small boxes that arrive on a schedule stay fresh.

That's why we sell one box at a time. Buy what you'll use in the next few weeks and set the next delivery for when you need it.

Free bags and stickers are part of the price

Every box has free bags built in. A one-time box is 100 paid bags plus 20 free, 120 in total. Subscribe & Save packs in 50 free for 150 in all.

Each box also has 100 food tamper-evident stickers, so app orders leave your counter sealed without a separate supply bill. That matters when a driver is carrying your food across the Bay Bridge and the customer wants to know nobody opened it.

Five questions to text any supplier

Paste these into a message before you agree to a print order. If a supplier can't answer all five in writing, keep looking.

• How much is the setup charge, and do I pay it again when I reorder?
• What's the smallest number of bags you'll print?
• Does the price include freight to my Bay Area address?
• Can I see my logo on the bag before I pay?
• Can I pause or skip a delivery if business slows down?

Our answers: $0 and never again, one box, yes shipping is free, yes in the upload step, and yes on Subscribe & Save. Before you order, take a look at the print proof page to see sample designs, or head back to printed kraft takeout bags for the Bay Area for the full picture.