Ask a bar manager what lime juice costs and you'll get a number off the last invoice. Sixty-five dollars a case. Maybe eighty when the market moves. That number is honest, and it is also nowhere near the real figure.
A 40 lb case of limes yields roughly 150 fruit. Squeezed properly, each gives about an ounce, so call it 150 ounces, or 4.4 litres, assuming your prep cook isn't leaving a third of it in the rind. That's the top of the funnel. Everything after it is leakage.
The three costs nobody puts on the invoice
Labour. Forty-five minutes to break down and press a case is conservative. At a blended prep rate of $22 an hour, that's $16.50 of payroll poured into every case before a single cocktail is sold. Do it four times a week and you've spent $3,400 a year hand-squeezing fruit.
Spoilage. Citrus is a countdown. Between over-ordering for a slow week, fruit that turns before Thursday, and juice that oxidises overnight in a squeeze bottle, twelve percent is a generous estimate of what you lose. Some rooms run closer to twenty.
Volatility. Produce pricing moves with weather, fuel and border traffic. A case that costs $65 in March can cost $110 in August, and your menu price cannot move that fast. Every summer, your margin gets quietly eaten.
Fresh juice isn't expensive because of the fruit. It's expensive because of everything that happens to the fruit before it reaches the glass.
What the honest number looks like
Take a room doing 400 citrus-forward drinks a week at one ounce of juice each. That's 400 ounces, or about 2.7 cases weekly once you account for spoilage. Fruit: roughly $175. Labour: roughly $45. Call it $220 a week, $11,400 a year, before a drop of spirit.
Now hold that against a ready-to-pour cold-pressed litre with zero prep time and effectively zero spoilage. The fruit cost per ounce is higher on paper. The delivered cost per ounce is lower, usually by twenty to forty percent, because you stopped paying for the parts of the process that don't end up in the drink.
The argument that isn't about money
Consistency is the second half of this. Hand-squeezed juice varies by fruit, by season, by whoever was on prep. That variance shows up in the glass, and your guest can taste it even if they can't name it. A cold-pressed, HPP-treated litre is the same acidity every time, which means your margarita is built to a spec instead of to a guess.
Run your own numbers before you take anyone's word for it. We built a calculator that does this math with your volume, your labour rate and your local produce pricing.