Cooking Up Gold in MoP

Let's go cook!  Before you start cringing at the thought of doing more repetitive tasks in the game, because doing a zillion dailies is not enough, relax I am talking about farming the Auction House for cooking materials!  Yeah! 

With the release of Mist of Pandaria, we were given a new way to level our cooking profession and we were given a farm to begin growing cooking materials.  Turns out that this is a necessity in the game because the materials have a very very low drop rate outside of farming.  These materials are needed to cook up buff food or feasts for raiding.  The other thing did Blizzard did, probably to make it more interesting, is that the gave us the ability to plant seeds that grow into non cooking materials, such as; enchanting materials, leather, cloth, etc.  Neat idea for those who are bored I guess.  But the kick for me is that we can also plant seeds to grow Motes of Harmony!

But wait a minute, if we use the plots to grow Motes of Harmony then how do we get our cooking materials?  The Auction House!  As many people have already discovered, there is a huge market that ha been created in the Auction House by selling cooking materials that are needed for all buff foods.  This is HUGE.  This market never even existed until MoP.  Sure, there was and still is the market for fish and meats to use in cooking, but this is totally new.

So what do I do and how do I make gold in this market?

First off I do not grow any cooking materials on my farm (unless it is an 85 alt that cannot do anything else), I grow Motes of Harmony.  These are of high value and I need them for crafting as well.  Like many others, I turn to the AH to buy cooking materials to cook up food and feasts.  Just like anything else sold in the AH, the prices are all over the board which means I can make some great gold in this market.

So far, I have only dabbled in it, not truly grasping the full impact that we have at our fingertips.  Now that I have, lookout!  I made probably 15k gold without even trying to in this market, what happens if I really apply my same flipping concepts to it?  What I like about this market is that people have limited amounts of supply, unlike fishing you cannot get some bot in the game that farms up 100 stacks of cabbage, therefore the market has a problem of limited supply versus high demand.  I will take advantage of this.

My plan:  Buy low, sell high.  I have 1 main competitor in this market and a few other small ones.  I want to take keep my sales at prices that move inventory (going for volume) but are still just under the price point of my main competition.   On my server, I see that the competitor has these items (Carrots, Cabbage, Melons, etc) all priced at about 25g each.  I will go for 24.99 each.  I will buy everything lower and relist at my price.  Some people are listing these for as little as 6g each, silly people!  More gold for me!

I post these in 2 increments, stacks of 5 and stacks of 50.  Those that are slowly leveling their cooking or just making food for rep quests will be buying stacks of 5 while others who want feasts will be stacks of 50.  Let's get both markets. The volume of sales tends to be good on most servers so make this a daily regiment.  I will spend about 10 minutes buying and posting. 

The goal for this method should net me an easy 50k in a month, check back to see if it happens!