Setting the Scene

The new Xbox 1000 has just come out, and you NEED to get it. But to do so you’ll need to start saving a lot more than the money. After all the kids in school loved the cookies your mom baked for the school fundraiser, you had the genius idea to start up a bakery with her and split the profits 50-50!

To start off, you’re just going to sell 2 cookies. After polling your friends, the top two cookies everyone loves are chocolate chip and sugar cookies.

Each batch of cookies is 12 cookies. You can sell one batch of chocolate chip cookies for $20 and one batch of sugar cookies for $15.

Picture of chocolate chip cookie that says $20, and a picture of a sugar cookie that says $15

You need to buy the ingredients to make the cookies. In supply chain, these are known as “raw materials”. When you did the math, you found that since chocolate chip cookies use more ingredients than sugar cookies, each batch will cost you $10 in raw materials. Each batch of sugar cookies will only cost $7.

The cookie business is very competitive. To stay in business, you need to make a profit, which means you make more money than you spend.

How do you calculate profit?
Profit = Revenue - Cost

Revenue is the total money you make selling cookies. When you subtract the cost of the ingredients that were used to make those cookies, you are left with the profit!

Here’s the catch- you only have a limited number of common ingredients that you have to share between both of the cookies. But each batch requires a different amount. To make it simple, I’ve only included 3 of the main ingredients: eggs, flour, and sugar.

Table view of all constraints

You want to make the most amount of money selling the cookies with the ingredients you have. So what can we do?