Which items actually make you money

Every list of profitable concession items you can find online says popcorn, nachos and soda, and none of them show a number. So here are numbers from a stand that recorded twenty games of them — starting with the part that decides whether any of it is worth reading.

A margin is only as good as the recipe behind it

When we ranked our own items by margin, the top of the list was wrong. Four items showed margins between 98% and 100%, which would be extraordinary, and all four were extraordinary for the same boring reason: their recipes were incomplete. One of them was a six-dollar drink whose recipe listed a cup, a lid and a straw — and no drink.

Nothing flagged it. Every ingredient that was listed had a price, so the software had no way to know that the ones missing were the ones that mattered. It reported exactly what it was told.

That is worth saying out loud because it is the failure mode of this whole genre. A margin figure is a division, and it is only as honest as the recipe underneath. So everything below comes from one of two places:

• Items sold exactly as they are bought. A Kit Kat is a Kit Kat. There is no recipe to get wrong, so the margin is trustworthy by construction and needs no judgement from anybody.
• Recipes we read line by line against what the thing actually is.

Everything else is left out. That is a smaller article than we could have written, and it is the only version worth publishing.

The candy shelf is the clearest lesson on the board

Every bar on this stand’s shelf sells for two dollars. Here is what six of the twelve cost.

Item	Cost	Margin
Sour Punch Straws	$0.62	69.0%
Airheads Xtremes	$0.93	53.5%
Snickers	$1.09	45.5%
Twix	$1.11	44.5%
Kit Kat	$1.16	42.0%
Nerds Gummy Clusters	$1.54	23.0%

One price, and a spread from 23% to 69%. The Nerds are not a rounding error — they are the worst margin in the entire catalog, worse than anything else the stand sells, and they sit on the shelf looking exactly like the Sour Punch Straws that earn three times as much.

Nothing about a wrapper tells you this. It is only visible if somebody has written down what the case cost and how many bars were in it.

Drinks: the cheap ones win, by a lot

The same pattern, and the same flat price — three dollars for anything in a bottle or a can.

Item	Cost	Margin
Bottled water	$0.99	67.0%
Bottled tea	$0.99	67.0%
Sports drink	$1.48	50.7%
Name-brand soda	$1.53	49.0%

Water and tea beat name-brand soda by eighteen percentage points on an identical price. Soda is what people ask for and it should absolutely stay on the board — but if you are deciding what to put in the front of the cooler, or what to buy more of when the budget is tight, the answer is not the thing with the loudest logo on it.

The things you make yourself do best

The five recipes we checked line by line all beat everything above.

Item	Price	Cost	Margin
Sweet tea	$3.00	$0.27	91.0%
Hot dog	$4.00	$0.61	84.8%
Nachos	$4.00	$0.63	84.3%
Coffee	$3.00	$0.49	83.7%
French fries	$4.00	$0.80	80.0%

Sweet tea at 91% is the quiet winner of the whole board — a tea bag, sugar, a cup, a lid and a straw, twenty-seven cents. Coffee is nearly as good and is six separate things, none of which costs more than four cents except the coffee itself.

The hot dog is worth a second look because five things go into it and only one of them is the frankfurter. That is 29 cents. The bun is 24 cents — very nearly as much again, which nobody expects — and foil, mustard and ketchup add eight cents between them. Every one of the five has to be in the recipe, or the margin is a fiction.

The rule underneath all five is the same: when you assemble something, you are buying ingredients at case prices and selling servings, and the gap between those two units is where the margin lives. When you sell a candy bar you are buying and selling the same object, and there is nowhere for a margin to come from except the markup.

Where the money actually comes from

Across the season, food was 48% of the takings and drinks were 42%. Candy — which occupies a disproportionate share of the shelf, the ordering conversation and the arguments — was 6%.

That is the number worth taking away. The candy shelf is a good lesson about margins and a small part of the business. If you want to move the total, you move drinks and food, and the way you move them is by knowing what a serving costs before the season starts rather than after it ends.