A recipe is written in stems: 85 garden roses, 60 spray roses, 40 ranunculus. A wholesale invoice is written in bunches, and a bunch is a fixed count you buy whole or not at all. Getting from one to the other means rounding, and rounding the wrong way — or at the wrong point in the calculation — either under-orders the job or quietly pads the quote. Here is the arithmetic, worked on a real five-variety recipe.
Two roundings happen, in this order and not the other way round. First, add a shrink allowance — breakage, blown blooms, processing loss — to the stem count the recipe calls for, and round that up to a whole stem. Second, divide by the bunch size and round up to a whole bunch. Doing the bunch rounding first and adding shrink to the result buys a fraction of a bunch, and no wholesaler sells one.
Worked on 85 stems of a ten-stem variety with an 8% shrink allowance: 85 × 1.08 = 91.8, rounded up to 92 stems needed. 92 ÷ 10 = 9.2, rounded up to 10 bunches. The invoice is for 100 stems against a recipe that called for 85 — not because the shrink allowance is generous, but because the tenth bunch was always going to be bought in full once the count passed 90.
Applied to every line of a five-variety wedding recipe, with an 8% shrink allowance and ten-stem bunches throughout:
| Line | Stems needed | With 8% shrink | Bunches ordered | Stems purchased | Leftover |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focal (garden rose) | 85 | 92 | 10 | 100 | 15 |
| Secondary (spray rose) | 60 | 65 | 7 | 70 | 10 |
| Texture (ranunculus) | 40 | 44 | 5 | 50 | 10 |
| Greenery (eucalyptus) | 30 | 33 | 4 | 40 | 10 |
| Accent (stock) | 25 | 27 | 3 | 30 | 5 |
| Total | 240 | — | — | 290 | 50 |
Five lines, five separate roundings — the leftover on each line depends on where that line's own stem count happens to fall against its own bunch size, not on the size of the wedding. A recipe that lands just past a boundary on every line rounds up every time; one that lands just under rounds up on none of them. Both are normal, and neither is a sign anything was priced wrong.
Fifty stems left over on a 240-stem recipe is not fifty stems of waste — it is stems that were always going to be part of the bunches the wholesaler sells, whether the base recipe used them or not. The ordinary destinations, roughly in the order studios reach for them:
Whatever is left after that is a reasonable thing to compost or donate. None of this needs to be quoted to the client in advance — the bunch rounding already priced the stems, so what becomes of them afterward doesn't change what was charged.
Because a wholesaler doesn't sell single stems of most varieties — they sell bunches, and a bunch is a fixed count you either buy whole or don't buy at all. A recipe calling for 85 garden roses from a variety that ships ten to a bunch means the invoice is for 90 or 100, never 85. There is no line item for five-ninths of a bunch.
Add the shrink allowance to the stem count first, then divide by the bunch size and round up. For 85 stems with an 8% shrink allowance, that's 85 x 1.08 = 91.8, rounded up to 92 stems needed, divided by a bunch size of 10 and rounded up again to 10 bunches — 100 stems purchased. Rounding at the end instead of the start of that sequence gives a different, wrong, answer on some lines.
They are not waste unless you treat them that way. The usual destinations are boutonnieres and corsages (which use a handful of stems each and are easy to under-budget for separately), extra bud vases for a welcome or gift table, topping up an arrangement that looks thin after transport, or a take-home bouquet for the couple. Whatever isn't used is a reasonable thing to compost or donate rather than something to feel you must price a use for in advance.
No — only when it pushes the stem count across a bunch-size boundary. On a line already sitting well under a full bunch's worth of headroom, a one- or two-point change in the shrink percentage does nothing to the bunch count, because the rounded-up total doesn't change. On a line sitting just under a boundary, the same change adds a whole bunch. That is why the effect of shrink is a per-line question, not a flat percentage of the total.
No. Nothing leaves your browser. The calculator this page links to runs entirely on your own device; nothing you enter is uploaded.
Open the wedding florist proposal calculator → — it runs this same per-line rounding on your own recipe and reports the bunch count, the leftover, and the resulting gross margin.