Pricing a product stands as one of the hardest decisions a founder must make. Set the price too high and customers disappear. Set it too low and the business starves. Yet many early-stage founders rely on instinct rather than evidence to arrive at their price point, a mistake that can undermine profitability and growth. According to Ed van der Lande, founder of toddler food brand More Toddler Meals, the path to confident pricing starts long before a number is chosen, it begins with product validation and a ruthless accounting of true costs.
Van der Lande launched More Toddler Meals in 2022, inspired by rations he ate while deployed with the British Army. His pricing journey offers a practical template for founders navigating this critical decision. The core insight: gather real data from real customers, calculate every cost component (including the small ones), and iterate based on evidence rather than hunches alone.
Validate Before You Price
Van der Lande started with competitor research, mapping out price points across baby and toddler food products. This research provided useful context about market rates. However, he quickly recognized a common pitfall: fixating on competitor pricing. “Everyone’s on a different process, and you don’t know what’s going on behind the wheel,” he explained.
More importantly, he validated that customers actually wanted his product before worrying about price. He set up a high street day on Kingston High Street, selling at an initially lower price point to answer a fundamental question: would anyone buy this? “The most important thing is validating the assumption that anyone cares about your product, or that you’re actually solving a particular pain point for a customer,” van der Lande said. He deliberately avoided asking family and friends for feedback, knowing they would be polite rather than honest. “The public will be pretty brutal with their feedback sometimes, which is super helpful because that’s what you need.”
Calculate Every Cost, Including the Small Ones
Once demand was confirmed, van der Lande tackled the unglamorous work of calculating true cost of goods. When manufacturing from home, this proved difficult. Freeze drying is energy-intensive, but electricity costs were mixed in with household bills. Only after bringing on a manufacturer did the numbers become clear.
Looking back, van der Lande identified a critical mistake: underestimating small costs. “I was probably a little bit optimistic, forgetting some of those little costs that come in, like cardboard boxes, fuel for paying the courier. I hadn’t baked some of that in, which just chipped away at margin.” These overlooked expenses quietly eroded profitability and forced pricing adjustments later. Founders who skip detailed cost accounting risk either starting with margins so thin they cannot sustain the business or discovering too late that they have priced too low.
Set Price Strategy Based on Clear Margins
Van der Lande’s cost analysis revealed that his initial cost of goods was too high. He would have needed to charge £5.95 or higher, which he instinctively knew was unsustainable. He set an upper limit of £4.50, which provided margin while leaving room to reduce costs through volume and efficiency gains.
When Ocado came on board as a retailer, the negotiation revealed a hard truth: “The retailer dictates the selling price.” Ocado set the resale price at £3.95, forcing van der Lande to rethink his margin strategy entirely. Where negotiation did exist was not on the final price, but on the retailer’s margin percentage (typically 35 to 45 percent in food) and payment terms. For a cash-strapped startup, negotiating favorable payment terms or lower minimum order quantities can matter as much as the unit price itself.
Let Data Guide Bundle and Discount Decisions
Van der Lande’s early bundle strategy started with intuition, offering 10 percent off for three meals, 15 percent off for six, and 20 percent off for nine. But as the business matured, he shifted to data-driven decisions. He analyzed Meta advertising data to understand how much he was paying to acquire each customer, then calculated what discount levels he could afford while protecting contribution margin.
“You’ve got to look at what your contribution margin is going to be, and then work out how much you’re willing to pay for a customer, what the lifetime value is,” van der Lande explained. This approach transformed bundling from a guess into a calculated lever tied to business metrics rather than what “seemed reasonable.”
Price for Inflation Without Breaking Trust
As energy costs and ingredient prices climbed, van der Lande faced pressure to raise his selling price. He resisted the easy path of incremental price increases, recognizing that frequent small hikes damage customer trust. Instead, he explored reformulation and cost reduction to protect his margin without raising the price.
“The challenge now for me, with energy costs rocketing up, our cost of goods going up, is what do I do to my end price?” he said. Rather than pass every cost increase directly to customers, he acknowledged the tradeoff: “If you start high, that gives you room to do promotions and bundle offers.” Starting with a higher initial price creates flexibility to adjust downward or offer discounts without appearing desperate or indecisive.
Van der Lande’s advice for founders at the pricing stage is direct: establish a clear unique selling proposition, validate that customers will pay premium prices if you choose them, and build in buffer for costs you have not yet discovered. “Give yourself that room to account for unforeseen costs, promotional spend, marketing, everything’s going to cost more than what you think.”
Pricing remains one of the highest-leverage decisions a founder makes, yet it benefits least from instinct alone. The evidence suggests that founders who combine market validation, detailed cost accounting, retailer negotiation, and data-driven iteration avoid the mistakes that leave money on the table or price themselves out of reach.