Frank would need to sell 25 batches of cookies to recover his costs, and he only has 24 batches. So even if he sells out ALL of the cookies, he would still take a loss on the booth. He could see a few options here: Consider the event an "investment" and hope that customers will buy more in the future - a very risky strategy that rarely pans out. Don't attend the event and find other marketing channels that would have a better payoff - certainly an option, especially if there are a lot of options that you need to assess between. Play with the number to see what it would take to make the event make sense - let's start here! The first thing to test with the numbers is pricing - this can have a huge impact on your profit. Let's say that you start charging $2 per cookie. Keeping the other assumptions the same ($10 / batch of materials, 24 batches capacity, $350 cost of attending the event), what do your numbers look like now? What is the gross profit per batch? Batches to break even on booth investment? Net profit if all cookies are sold