Tolling fee
Also called Toll processing fee, Conversion cost, Run rate
What a contract manufacturer charges to turn your ingredients into finished units — labour, line time and overhead, but not materials.
A tolling fee is the price of the manufacturing itself, quoted separately from what the ingredients and packaging cost. It is usually expressed per unit — per can, per bottle, per jar — and sometimes per hour of line time or per batch.
It nearly always drops as the run gets bigger, because the fixed cost of setting up, cleaning down and changing over is spread across more units. Most sites publish a banded rate card: one price under ten thousand units, a lower one above it, and so on. The bands are not standard — every site slices them differently, and comparing two quotes means comparing them at the volume you actually intend to run, not at the headline number.
The word “tolling” comes from toll manufacturing, where a customer supplies the raw material and pays only for the processing. If your co-packer buys the ingredients instead, what you are quoted is usually a full landed price per unit rather than a tolling fee, and the two are not comparable without unpicking them.
NextBatch keeps this straight for you. Cost per unit, tolling tiers, yield and traceability all derive from the same plan you and your co-manufacturer share — so none of it is a number somebody typed twice.
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