Cooking and alchemy profit in Albion Online
Why consumables do not work like gear crafting in Albion Online: batch output, the smaller consumable return rate, flat station fees, focus specs and where demand actually is.
Output per craft
food 10 / potions 5 / intermediates 1
Divide by the batch size to get cost per item. Getting this wrong makes every profit figure wrong.
Return rate
1 - 1 / (1 + bonus / 100)
The consumable city bonus is 15 points, not 40. Royal 18 plus focus 59 plus city 15 is a 47.9% return.
Station fee
flat charge per craft
Charged per craft rather than scaled by item value, and it is never returned to you.
Consumables do not work like gear
If you come to cooking from weapon crafting, the first thing that will confuse you is the output. Most food recipes produce ten portions per craft, not one. Soups, salads, pies, omelettes, stews, sandwiches and roasts all come out in batches of ten. Potions come out in fives. A handful of intermediates like flour, bread, butter and fish sauce produce a single item.
This matters enormously because the ingredient list you see in game is the cost of one craft, which gives you ten items. Divide by ten and you get cost per item. Confuse the two and every profit number you calculate will be wrong by an order of magnitude.
The tool shows both. Ingredients are listed as whole numbers for one real craft, because those are the amounts you actually have to buy, and profit is shown per craft and per item so you can compare against market prices directly.
Return rate for consumables is smaller than you think
Cooking and alchemy use the same diminishing returns curve as everything else, but the city bonus is much weaker. Gear crafting and refining get 40 points in the right city. Consumables get 15.
returnRate = 1 - 1 / (1 + bonus / 100)
So a royal city (18) with focus (59) gives 77 points and a 43.5% return rate. Add the consumable city bonus and 92 points gives roughly 47.9%. The bonus city for cooking is Caerleon, and for alchemy it is Brecilien. Useful, but nowhere near the swing you get when refining in the right place.
Butchering raw meat and making fish sauce do not benefit from return rate at all, which is worth remembering before you build a business around them.
A worked example
Take Carrot Soup. One craft consumes 16 carrots and produces 10 bowls. Say carrots cost 250 silver each and you are crafting with focus in a royal city, giving a 43.5% return rate. The station fee for food is a flat charge per craft rather than a percentage of item value.
Gross ingredient cost is 16 x 250 = 4000 silver. After the return rate you effectively pay 4000 x 0.565 = 2260. Add the station fee for the batch and divide by the ten bowls you received, and you land at roughly 248 silver per bowl.
That is the number to compare against the market price of Carrot Soup, and it is nothing like the 400 silver per bowl you would calculate if you forgot the batch size.
Focus, specs and where the demand is
Focus cost for consumables halves for every 10,000 points of focus cost efficiency, and efficiency comes from your cook or alchemist mastery plus the specialisation node that matches the item. The active specialisation is worth far more than the others, so levelling one family deeply beats spreading levels thinly across everything.
As for what to make, demand for consumables is driven by content rather than fashion. Large scale ZvZ fights burn through resistance and healing potions at a rate nothing else matches. Gathering food and hunting food sell steadily to a quieter but very consistent audience. Cheap low tier soups move constantly because new players eat them and building owners need them for nutrition.
Unlike gear, consumables get consumed. That sounds obvious, but it means the market never saturates the way weapon markets do. There is always another fight.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do the ingredient amounts look so large?
- Because they are the amounts for one real craft, and one craft usually gives ten items. Showing fractional ingredients per item would look tidier but would be useless in practice, since you cannot buy 1.6 carrots or craft a tenth of a soup.
- Is cooking or alchemy more profitable?
- Alchemy tends to have higher value per item and sharper demand spikes around large fights. Cooking has steadier, higher volume demand. Alchemy rewards timing, cooking rewards consistency.
- Does the bonus city matter for consumables?
- It helps but far less than for refining. Fifteen points instead of forty means the difference between crafting in the bonus city and crafting in any other royal city is a few percent of return rate, not a transformation. Focus matters considerably more.
- Why is there no return rate on my butchered meat?
- Butchering raw meat and producing fish sauce are exceptions in the game and do not benefit from return rate. Your input cost is your full input cost for those steps.
- Do I need to grow my own ingredients?
- No, and for many recipes buying from the market is faster than farming. Farming makes sense when a specific ingredient is consistently overpriced, or when you already have island space you are not otherwise using.
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