What a SNAP Breakfast costs, down to the penny

An entire free breakfast, including a breakfast burrito and a latte, costs us exactly $4.85.

Many of you give to feed people, so you deserve to see exactly how this money is steward for our community. This post gives a detailed view of our internal costs for this program. 

About the SNAP Breakfast Program

We started the SNAP Breakfast Program in October of 2025, when the government shutdown cut off our neighbors' SNAP benefits. Every day since, anyone who walks into Heretic can get a hot breakfast burrito and a coffee for free - no questions asked.

These numbers are based on January-September 2026. To give you a glimpse into the SNAP Breakfast Program costs, here's what September 2026 looked like:

• 978 free breakfast burritos: 685 bacon, 275 vegan

• 1,491 free drinks, most of them lattes. 87% of free lattes also got one of our house syrups.

• 58 to 121 free items a day, depending on the day.

In 2026, we'll have given away more than 12,000 meals and 13,000 drinks. In 2027 we expect to serve more than 20,000 free meals.

One free breakfast, down to the penny

The food and packaging in one free breakfast (a burrito and a latte with house syrup) cost $3.43.

Our Kitchen, and the team that makes the burritos

Every Monday, our kitchen manager and a crew of volunteers spend a full eight-hour day in a rented commercial kitchen, making the week's burritos. Our volunteer team is 2 different four-hour crews; we never ask our volunteers for more than 4 hours a week. The kitchen is used specifically for the SNAP program. 

While we do have a kitchen on-site at Heretic, it is not permitted to cook or prepare food. This is why we rent an outside kitchen for our free meals.

The whole program: $648 a day

Counting everything it takes, the SNAP Breakfast Program costs an estimated $19,436 a month, or $233,228 a year. That works out to $648 a day, or $7.87 for each free item. And, a free breakfast doesn't happen without a building, people behind the counter, and all the equipment it takes to make this happen.

Here's a nerdy coincidence: the average menu price of a free item is $7.48. Since we know these numbers down to the penny, we can honestly say that giving something away costs us about what it would cost you to buy it.

The $4.85 breakfast above isn't extra on top of this. It's the part of these costs that goes straight into the meal itself. The rest is the people and the place that make it possible.

Even more behind-the-scenes breakdowns

How we are able to pay for this:

• SNAP Breakfast donations. We budget about $6,000 a month in SNAP Breakfast Donations. These gifts are restricted: they can only be spent on feeding people for free.

• Our café. Coffee sales, tips and online orders pay for the rest of the shop, and help carry the program too.

• Grants. For 2027 we're raising $54,700 in grants to close the gap between what comes in and what it costs, without serving a single fewer meal.

We also start 2027 with about $90,000 in a restricted free-meal reserve. It lets us keep the door open while grants come in. Without new grants or more donations, we'd draw it down by about $4,558 a month.

How we double-check our work:

• Every free item is rung up at $0, so we have a daily count.

• Every cost on this page comes from a real invoice or a house recipe.

• An outside bookkeeping firm, Jitasa, keeps our books, including the restricted funds.

• Starting in January 2027, we'll send donors a monthly report on what came in, what went out and how many people we fed.

How we got these numbers

• Counts come from our Square item report for September 1–30, 2026. A free item is anything rung up at $0.

• Prices come from September 2026 invoices: Odeko (milk), WebstaurantStore (cups, lids and foil sleeves), Bellwether (green coffee), and Chefstore and Cash & Carry (burrito ingredients), shipping included. Syrup ingredients use prices as of October 8, 2026.

• Recipes: 18 g of coffee per double shot and 8 oz of milk per latte.

• Program costs come from our proposed 2027 operating budget. Some totals are rounded, so they can be a cent or a dollar off.

• One month is a snapshot. We'll update these numbers as more months come in.

Where Misinformation could (and probably will) happen

The vast majority of the folks who know about the SNAP Breakfast have been champions of this work; but sometimes, folks online like to run only a small portion of the information above - which then leaves out clarity. So, let’s talk about something you could see online:

“Heretic spends $20,000 a month to only feed up to 60 people a day.” If you see that line somewhere, that means they left out the fact that we have factored in literally everything it takes to make this run: the cost of food, employment, rent, etc. Literally, all of it. The food itself is a much smaller number. The ingredients and packaging for one breakfast, a burrito and a latte, cost $3.43. The rest is what it takes to have a warm, safe place open every single morning, with real people behind the counter. We could have published only the $3.43. We didn’t, because being transparent means showing you all of it.

“You could feed way more people if your burritos didn’t cost as much.” You’re right that we could make a cheaper meal, and we’ve answered this one in the comments a few times. There’s a belief that comes up a lot when people talk about feeding our houseless neighbors and folks cut off SNAP: that they should get only the bare minimum to survive. I also want to be very clear: this is not us putting down the incredible organizations that do make a huge amount of food to feed folks in our community. They are good, important, and needed. We are all working together to take care of the folks in our communities, and for us, this is the way we do it.

We talk a lot about dignity around here, and dignity means everyone who walks through our door is treated the same. Whether you’re paying or not, you get a latte made with one of our house syrups and a breakfast burrito that was put together to be both nourishing and good.

Our burrito costs $2.02 in ingredients.

The drink costs an estimated $1.41.

We believe our neighbors are worth it.

We hope this gives you even more detailed insight in how we track our SNAP Meal costs. We are always searching for ways to ethically reduce our costs, while not reducing the quality in our free meals. 

And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here.

- Josh White