Finding the optimum supply quantity when there is uncertainty in forecast This is actually a quiz that will be needed in a real life food stall! I need to decide how much stock to supply for my pumpkin soup stall. I sell each soup for $5$ dollars a cup, and let's say my ingredients cost is $1$ dollar. Therefore an outcome of under-forecasting is $4$ dollars per unit, while an outcome of over-forecasting is 1 dollar per unit. 
My forecast isn't so simple, however. I'm guessing that the most probable number of sales is $150$ units, but I'm very unsure, so there's a normal distribution behind this prediction with a standard deviation of $30$ units. 
This is harder than I expected.
Intuitively I would prepare ingredients for $180$ units, at which point I'd guess that the likely opportunity costs that would come with understocking would roughly meet the likely costs of overstocking. But given this is such a common dilemma, I thought that someone must be able to find a precise solution, and would then hopefully be able to explain it in layman's terms. 

This appears to be an instance of the Newsvendor Model. If the probability distribution of your demand is known, a (more-or-less) closed-form solution exists in terms of your costs and profit.
