Start from the shelf price and work backwards.

Forward mode answers "given my FOB, what will this cost on the shelf?" REV mode answers the question buyers actually put to you: "it needs to retail at $12.99 — what do you have to charge for that to work?" Any SKU row in the calculator can flip between the two, and reverse is the exact inverse of forward — same margins, same freight and excise, run backwards.

When to price backwards

Forward pricing starts from your cost and discovers the shelf price. That's the right direction when you're building a model from your own economics. But plenty of pricing conversations start at the other end:

• A buyer names the price point. "This goes on the $12.99 endcap or it doesn't go in" — now FOB is the unknown, not the input.
• You're matching a competitor. The category leader sits at a known shelf price and you need to know what FOB gets you next to it.
• You're defending a psychological band. The product has to stay under $10, or $15, or whatever line your consumer won't cross.

In each case the market has already decided the shelf price; your job is to find out whether your cost structure can live with it. That's what REV mode computes. Because reverse is the exact inverse of the forward math, a SKU flipped one way and back agrees with itself — there's no separate "reverse engine" to reconcile. The strategy side of this — when to let the shelf lead — is covered in Reverse Pricing.

Flipping a SKU to REV

Every SKU row has a two-button toggle in the Mode column: Fwd and Rev ←. Click Rev ← and two cells trade jobs:

• Retail / Pack stops being a computed result and becomes an editable input — your target.
• FOB / case stops being an input and becomes a computed readout, marked with an ≈ hint instead of the pencil.

The flip is deliberately gentle: the target pre-fills with the shelf price the row was already showing in forward mode, so nothing jumps when you switch. You adjust from a number you recognize rather than a blank field. Mode is per-SKU — flipping one row leaves every other row exactly as it was.

Entering the target shelf price

The target is a price per retail pack — one 4-pack, one 6-pack, one keg — the same unit the Retail / Pack column uses in forward mode. Type the number the shelf tag needs to say and the whole row recalculates the moment you commit the field, like everything else in the calculator.

Two things keep working exactly as they do in forward mode:

• Retail / Single is still computed — your target divided by units per pack, so you can sanity-check the per-can price at the same time.
• Margins still come from your global distributor and retailer settings, with per-SKU overrides when one row carries different terms. How those interact is covered in Setting Distributor & Retailer Margins.

Reading the required FOB

With a target in place, the FOB column shows the answer. Under the hood the calculator walks the three-tier chain in reverse: strip the retailer's margin off the target to get the distributor's sell-in per pack, multiply up to a full case, strip the distributor's margin to get landed cost, then back out freight and excise (and add back any depletion allowance) to arrive at FOB. It's the forward calculation, inverted step by step.

A worked example: with a 28.0% retail margin and a 32.5% distributor margin, a target shelf price of $12.99 backs out to a required FOB of $37.88 per case.

Field	Example	Who sets it
Target Retail / Pack	$12.99	You — the input in REV mode
Required FOB / case	$37.88	The calculator — the output

Read the result as a ceiling: charge more than that FOB and the product cannot hit $12.99 without someone giving up margin. The Sell-In, GP / Case, and Landed Cost columns still populate along the way, so you can see what each tier earns at your target — the anatomy of those columns is in FOB to Landed Cost.

The infeasibility warning

Set the target low enough and the math stops working: after freight, excise, and both margins take their share, there's nothing left for the producer. When the required FOB would be negative, the calculator floors the display at $0.00, turns it red, and prefixes it with a ⚠ warning. Hover it and the tooltip spells out the problem: the target shelf price is too low to cover freight, tax, and margins.

The warning is a negotiation map, not a dead end. Something in the row has to move:

• Raise the target — maybe the price point was never realistic for this format.
• Trim a margin — edit the distributor or retail margin on that row and watch the FOB come back above zero.
• Attack the add-ons — lower freight or excise assumptions if the originals were padded.

Because everything recalculates live, you can drag each lever and see exactly when the row turns feasible again.

Mixing FWD and REV rows

Mode is a per-SKU setting, so one model can run in both directions at once. A common shape: the core lineup priced forward from cost, plus one SKU in REV mode because a buyer has already dictated its shelf price. Both kinds of row share the same global margins and appear in the same totals.

Exports keep the distinction — each row carries a Mode column labeled Forward or Reverse, so anyone reading the file knows which prices were inputs and which were solved for. See Exporting for what lands in each format.

Flipping back is safe, too: switching a row to Fwd restores the FOB input with the value it held before — REV mode never overwrites your stored FOB. That makes it cheap to flip a row over, test a target, and flip back. For the rest of the row's fields — freight, excise, depletion — see SKU Rows, and for the page as a whole, The Calculator, Panel by Panel.