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Turn Your Home Bakery into a Profitable Business
- Trendy Mint
- Jul 28, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 27, 2024
How Can I Get More Orders So My Home Bakery Business Is Profitable?
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Have you ever found yourself lost in a mountain of cookie orders wondering if this home bakery business idea is even worth it?
You know, that point where the sweet smell of baking fills your home, but so does the overwhelming feeling of being buried alive. You dreamed of a flexible, creative home-based business, but now you’re trading precious moments with your family for endless hours of icing and decorating.
It’s like you're paying your customers to take your cookies off your hands.
Let's change that.
Time Spent on an Average Cookie Order
First let's math how much time it takes to fulfill one order. My average order is for 2 dozen decorated sugar cookies.
Let’s work out how much time it takes me to make 2 dozen decorated sugar cookies.
Shop for ingredients 1 hour
Make the dough 15 min
Make the icing 20 min
Do the dishes, clean up kitchen 20 min
Chill the Dough 1 hour
Roll out the dough 5 minutes
Cut out cookies 20 minutes
Chill cookies 1 hour
Bake cookies 30 min
Color Icing 15 min
Cool the cookies 1 hour
Flood cookies 1 hour
Detail Cookies avg 2 hours
Photos 20 min
Heat Seal 15 min
Final Packaging for Customer 10 min
That is a total of 590 minutes or nearly 10 hours! Yikes! First of all, I don’t want to work 10 hour days and second of all, it would take me the entire day for one order and forget about actually getting an hourly wage at this rate. Who ever said having a home bakery business would be easy?!
Phase-Based Approach
You have to streamline your home bakery’s operating system to become more efficient with the time you have, especially if you’re a one-person show like most of us are!
I think you’ll agree with me that if we restructure our time we spend working in our home bakery, bulk shop/ prep and divide each cookie order into “phases” we will save time in the long-run.
Phase ONE
Shop for ingredients 1 hour
Make the dough 15 min
Make the icing 20 min
Do the dishes, clean up kitchen 20 min
Chill the Dough 1 hour
Roll out the dough 5 minutes
Phase TWO
Cut out cookies 20 minutes
Chill cookies 1 hour
Bake cookies 30 min
Cool the cookies 1 hour
Phase THREE
Color Icing 15 min
Flood cookies 1 hour
Detail Cookies avg 2 hours
Phase FOUR
Photos 20 min
Heat Seal 15 min
Freeze
Phase FIVE
Thaw
Final Packaging for Customer 10 min
Bulk Batch (Phase One)
I make dough and icing once a month. Try to at least. Of course to do this, you’ll need to know how many orders you typically have and know how many cookies you can get out of each batch of dough and icing.
Don’t fret if you have to make more dough and icing during the month, that’s okay! It’s a learning process.
The idea is, that you’ll only be cleaning up your dishes and kitchen from making dough, once! Instead of 20+ times a month.
Just making your dough and icing in bulk, will cut off 3 hours from each order!
Bulk Bake (Phase Two)
I’ve made it clear to my customers that I prefer AT LEAST a two week notice on all cookie orders. So I generally know how many orders I have for the next two weeks at any given time.
Since I know what orders I have coming up in the next two weeks, I bulk-bake my cookies on every other Monday. I group each order in it’s own air-tight container and place it in the freezer.
By using one day to bulk-bake, I save almost another 3 hours per cookie order! Now we’re down to 4 hours per order. 2 hours per dozen. That sounds a lot more profitable!
Not only that, but I’m also only running my oven for two days per month (this is great during those HOT summer days!) instead of 20+. And I’m cleaning up a messy kitchen a whole lot less as well!
Phases Three-Five
These phases happen during the week. Typically, my day begins with Phase Five, completing the final packaging before customers arrive. Then it's on to Phase Four as I photograph each cookie set, heat seal them and freeze them.
Next is phase three, flooding and decorating cookies!
At the end of my day, Phase 5 begins with setting thawing out any pick-ups for the next day. In the morning I will complete phase 5 before the customer arrives. The circle is complete!
Making a Profit
Imagine this: You work 8 hour days Monday-Friday, have almost your whole weekend off, streamline your mixing, baking and pick-up process. You can fulfill 4 dozen cookies per day, if you charge $60/dozen (that's a conservative figure), that’s $240 per day. Subtract all of your expenses, ingredients, packaging, overheads and you’re probably looking at over $200 per day.
You may quickly find that hiring some help a few days a month will actually save your home bakery even more money over-all. You can easily train someone to batch-prep/bake for you 3 days a month for a minimum out-of-pocket expense.
Checkout this monthly/weekly calendar schedule to make it a reality:
Of course there are always last-minute orders I try to squeeze in or someone needs cookies on a Tuesday instead of the usual Saturday. That’s okay! This is just a guide on how to save time, it’s never going to be perfect for every week.
And for a basic daily schedule/checklist, check out this list that is my general daily structure:
More Time Saving Tips:
Bulk color your icing when possible - I try to keep a tub of black and pink on hand. And I go ahead and make flood-consistency and outline consistency white icing and bag it up.
Use your grocer’s pick-up option or get home-delivery from Amazon
Set up your social media messaging “auto reply” feature whenever anyone inquires about placing an order to direct them on how to place an order with you.
Save Even MORE Time
Use the freebie section on this site to make transfers ahead of time so you can take-on those last minute orders and cash in on the rush-fee!
Keep your supplies organized, start with these free cookie cutter labels!
Trade in your royal icing for rolled buttercream, you can make stunning cookies super fast!
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