Case: Cost System Considerations for CANADA SNOWCONES LTD.

Canada Snowcones Ltd. (CSL) owned and operated 20 retail frozen yogurt stores spread throughout Southern Ontario, from Toronto to Windsor. CSL's stores sold only high quality, premium frozen yogurt. They offered an assortment of 35 different frozen yogurt flavours. A significant amount of the CSL flavours were special, such as "Peanut Butter Bacon", "Charcoal-Sushi", and "Tropical Cheese Sensations". However, CSL also sold a few of the classic frozen yogurt flavours, such as vanilla, milk chocolate, mint, and other singular fruit flavours. While some of the flavours were very popular, there were also some of the more peculiar flavours that had low total sales in terms of units.

CSL produced its own frozen yogurt. The founder of the company, Samantha Reynolds, had originally made the yogurt in her basement. But eventual growing demand led to Samantha renting part of factory for CSL's production. As CSL grew, Samantha was able to afford automated but more costly production equipment that blended the flavours and packaged the liquid frozen yogurt for freezing. CSL's most significant production costs were for raw materials, particularly yogurt, brown sugar, and the special flavour ingredients, and for the purchase, operation, and maintenance of production equipment.

All of CSL's products had the same retail price, as customers could choose or combine any flavours by scoops. Samantha set the prices to generate, on average, a markup of 100% on average full production costs. CSL's 2019 budget included manufacturing overhead (MOH) of $450,000. To estimate product costs, Samantha spread this MOH cost to products based on a proportion of the direct labour (DL) costs used in the production process. CSL's total DL costs for 2019 was $200,000, so Samantha charged the overhead to products at a rate of MOH to total DL costs.

Last week, Laura Horton, Samantha's babysitter for her daughter and the CEO of a large production firm, advised that Samantha's pricing strategy was not optimal. Laura's insight was that the expenses for producing CSL's numerous flavours were not uniform. She thought those inconsistencies should be reflected in the prices charged, or CSL's earnings would fluctuate as the combination of flavours sold varied.

Laura proposed that Samantha reestimate product costs using activity-based costing. She recommended that Samantha identify the major activities whose costs were included in the company's MOH costs. Then, she should apply these costs to products based on the products consumption of each of those activities. In response to Laura's suggestions, Samantha prepared the information presented below in Table 1.

Samantha decided to hire your consulting firm to help calculate the costs of two demonstrative flavours as an experiment to see if Laura's activity based costing system suggested produced any significant contrasts. She asked Laura to take her best estimate as to where she might find the most material differences, if any existed. After Samantha described the products to her, Laura suggested that she use Peanut Butter Bacon and Chocolate as the test product examples. Table 2 provides data relevant to the two selected products.

Table 1 Canada Snowcones Ltd. - Budgeted MOH Costs Activity Budgeted Cost ($000) Driver Budgeted Activity Level Purchasing 60,000 Purchase Orders 829 Material Handling 71,250 Number of setups 1,766 Mixing 91,500 Mixing hours 920 Chilling 131,250 Chilling hours 1,856 Packaging 82,500 Packaging machine hours 1,020 Quality Control 13,500 Number of batches 206 Total MOH costs S 450,000 Table 2 Canada Snowcones Ltd. - Two Product Examples Peanut Butter Bacon Chocolate Direct Material (DM) 2.20 per gallon 1.90 per gallon Direct Labour (DL) 1.40 per gallon 1.40 per gallon Budgeted Production and sales 1,500 gallons 80,000 gallons Size of Batch 100 gallons 4,000 gallons Number of setups 3 per batch 3 per batch Size of Purchase Order 40 gallons 500 gallons Time in mixer 0.40 hour per 100 gallons 0.20 hour per 100 gallons Time in chiller 1.50 hour per 100 gallons 1.50 hour per 100 gallons Time in package machine 0.50 hour per 100 gallons 0.25 hour per 100 gallons