If you love baking and have an idea to sell your bakes, it is no longer difficult these days. You can start a small business from your home kitchen, as a homemade bakery, and with good sales planning, your bakery business can grow quickly.
Start Simply with a Homemade Bakery
A homemade bakery is one way to start selling baked goods from your home kitchen, making treats you can bake yourself in your own oven. This lets you choose good ingredients and control the quality of your bakes yourself, so your customers enjoy fresh, delicious, high-quality baked goods.
Preparing to Sell Your Bakes
1. Choose What to Sell
First, choose the type of bake you want to sell, based mainly on what you love making, to give your shop a clear signature. If you can make many types, you can sell a mix. For more ideas, here are some suggestions:
- Bread: French bread, white bread, wholewheat bread, scones, baguettes, pretzels
- Cakes: chiffon cake, butter cake, sponge cake
- Puff pastry: with savoury or sweet fillings, such as chicken pie, tuna pie, red pork pie, pineapple pie and coconut pie
- Short, crumbly bakes: cookies, tarts, short-crust pies, short dough
- Bakes combining puff pastry and bread: Danish pastries, croissants
- Hollow bakes for filling: éclairs, choux pastry
2. Get Your Equipment Ready
If you plan to sell baked goods, the one essential piece of equipment is an oven, because bakery means baked goods. The main baking equipment includes:
- Mixer, measuring spoons, measuring cups and jugs, cake knife, moulds, pastry brush, baking paper, hand whisk, mixing bowls, flour sifter, rolling pin, scales and oven gloves
3. Plan Your Funding Clearly
Funding is crucial for any business. When selling baked goods, plan carefully where your capital will come from. If it is your own savings, you won't have to worry about loan interest, but if you borrow, be careful with all your spending, because in the end your sales must earn back the investment.
To plan your funding, list every cost of running the business in full: equipment, ingredients, electricity, packaging, delivery and advertising. This tells you your exact costs and guides how you price each item you sell. Your choice of ingredients matters too: pricier ingredients can push your costs up. Plan all of this clearly from the start to protect the quality and income of your bakery sales as you intend.
4. Packaging
Packaging helps customers who buy your bakes remember you, and if someone receives your bakes as a gift and loves them, they will know how to contact your shop. Besides an attractive design, packaging should also protect the bakes from damage in transit, so that when customers open the box, the bakes still look as tempting as if they had just come out of the oven.
5. Plan Your Management Systems
Kitchen management deserves a lot of attention. To bake for sale every day, you need enough ingredients for the quantities you plan to make, so plan your ingredient volumes carefully: when to restock, and how to store things so you have enough without waste.
Marketing helps drive sales. Plan ahead which bakes you will sell each month, and when and for how long you will offer new fillings or seasonal specials, so you can prepare ingredients in time, and practise until you are skilled before putting new items on sale.
