How To Start A Home Bakery For Extra Income

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]If I wanted to make an extra $1,000, $2,000, or even $4,000 in a month, this is where I'd start. No, I wouldn't have a storefront. It would start right in my humble kitchen. This past weekend alone, I sold out of everything I brought to the farmers market. And I do that every single Saturday of the month. This weekend alone, I baked over a 100 loaves of sourdough, loaded it into my vehicle, took it to the farmers market, and sold out within a couple hours. So, today, friends, I'm pulling back that curtain, and I'm showing you exactly how I would start a home bakery from scratch. I'm talking about the equipment I would buy and the equipment that I wouldn't, what licensing requirements you might need and what I need in my estate, what it costs to get started, what I actually bake, and how much I actually make in 4 hours every Saturday. At the end of this video, you're going to want to stick around though because I break down all of our profit margins, cost of goods versus what we actually put in our pocket at the end of the day. These numbers are super, super surprising. It wasn't in fact until we started putting the formulas in the spreadsheets that I realized just how good a profit margins there were. I think you guys are going to be so, so shocked. So, if you are even slightly considering turning your home into a home bakery or a micro bakery, you're going to want to watch this video. Now, I just want to start in preference. This is not what I do full-time. In fact, what you see behind me is what I do. My husband and I are full-time farmers where we grow food and flowers for the farmers market and we also bake bread for our family. What started as just supplying my family with fresh nutritious bread each week turned into something that actually generated and turned quite a bit of profit for the time investment that it is. So now we sell about 100 plus loaves of bread at our farmers market each and every week.

[00:01:50]And we run a bread CSA here on farm. So I'll share with you guys in detail what that model could look like if maybe it's a better fit for you than showing up at the farmers market every week. But I'm so so excited because I know this has been such a blessing for my family and could potentially be a blessing for yours, too. So, let's get started. It is Thursday night about 700 p.m. and this is where my work starts for the farmers market. So, you want to know how I run a microbakery in my home in my small little normal home oven? This is where the nittygritty happens. So, Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. I start making my dough. So, typically that looks like from 700 p.m. until about 10 or 10:30.

[00:02:34]Every 30 minutes I am finishing a batch and moving on to the next batch. So, we have bought all of our bulk fermenting totes from a local restaurant supply store. So, they come in various sizes.

[00:02:49]This I can do a batch of 10 in pretty comfortably. I also have like bus totes that are $6.25.

[00:02:58]Again, I can do a batch of 10. Then I have these bigger ones. They all come with lids. This I could do a batch of 20 in. I've even done a batch of 30. And then I have one bigger than this that I can do a batch of 40 in. Now, I have realized that it is easier to do smaller batches at a time. Otherwise, it takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to hand mix a batch of 40, which we all know is a massive time suck.

[00:03:29]Oh, yeah.

[00:03:32]So, kind of my method is I weigh all my flour out in this bowl first. It goes into the vessel. I weigh out all the salt. It goes into the vessel. I mix it up. Then I'll put my starter in a jar with my water and my honey. Mix that up and then I'll pour it in. I've got everything, all of my knowledge right here on this little piece of paper. So for a batch of 10, I need 5,000 g of flour, 3,750 g of filtered water, 900 g of starter, 200 g of honey, and 120 g of salt. I'm going to do that three times. And then we're going to move to our double batch of 40. 10 done.

[00:04:22]>> 20 done, >> 30 done, 50 done, 70 loaves done and loaded. So, I'll see you guys in the morning.

[00:04:46]Good morning.

[00:04:49]Oh, my toddler decided to protest sleep last night.

[00:04:56]So, I just went to bed about an hour and a half ago, but we are getting ready for a busy day of baking.

[00:05:12]Let's um take a look at our doves. There's certainly no oversleeping when you run a home bakery because everything will over ferment.

[00:05:42]All right, enough whining. Let's get to work.

[00:05:47]Let's get to work.

[00:05:49]>> Everyone wants to know what mixer I use, but the truth is the mixer isn't what limits most home bakers. The bottleneck is usually space. Where are you proofing your dough? Where are you storing your finished loaves? Where are you cooling your bread after it comes out of the oven? So, before spending thousands of dollars on equipment, I would first figure out your workflow. A simple scale, your mixing dough, your dough containers in a reliable oven are going to take you surprisingly far. So, most of the dough containers you see here, I bought from a restaurant supply store, ranging from $6.25 to around $27. Now, hindsight 2020, I wish I would have never bought the biggest ones because I don't actually have a mixer. I'm mixing everything by hand, and I realize mixing 40 loaves at a time takes way too much time out of me. I prefer to do smaller batches of tin, and it actually cost me less money to do that. All in all, I spend around probably $200 for all of the containers that I use every single week. Now, before you sell a single thing, this is probably the most important part of this entire video, you have to learn your licensing in your local state regulations. So, before I ever baked a loaf of bread with the intent to sell, I first did my due diligence to figure out what was required from me by law. Now, I live in the state of Arkansas and it has a lot of freedoms with the Freedom Food Act and my local cottage laws. So, for me in my state, I do not have to bake bread in a commercial kitchen to be able to sell it. And I also do not have to have any sort of licensing. What I do have to do is follow food safety regulations, right? So, that means washing my hands regularly, making sure that my environment is clean. I have to label everything including where it was baked, the ingredients in it, the date it was baked, and stating that it was made in a home kitchen. Meaning, I could not package up my bread and sell it without a label indicating all of those things. So, I created a Canva template, made up a label, listed all of those things, put it on my packaging each week, and by doing so, I have abided by my state regulations. Now, I do know I have friends in several states running micro home bakeries. They have a few more hoops to jump through. In fact, one of my friends had to take an online food safety class and she has to renew that every single year. So, do your due diligence to figure out what is required from you by law before you ever decide to start your home bakery. For me, that requirement was pretty easy and hopefully it will be for you as well. If I was starting a home bakery today, I would not offer 10 flavors. I wouldn't offer 20 products. To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn't offer more than five or six. I'd start with one thing I could make exceptionally well.

[00:08:45]And the reason is every additional product that you have is going to create complexity. It's going to have more ingredients. You're going to need more inventory. Therefore, there's more opportunities to make mistakes, which means there's more chances you're going to run out of something or something's going to go wrong. So, when you look at my market booth, you're going to notice that I have one product that I've done really, really well. That is fkaca. I figured out how to make an exceptional product. I figure out how to offer a few different flavors and I've added in one French loaf. I really encourage you guys start simple, sell out, figure what performs well, and then you can expand from there. The reason I love bread as a potential income stream is that the startup costs are relatively low. The ingredients are wildly simple and you're going to get repeat customers, right?

[00:09:39]So, it's a product that people are going to buy again and again. In fact, I've seen this in my own business model. I show up to the farmers market each week and every single week the same customers come back and they are buying the same thing over and over and over again. So, you've got those retention customers which you're not always going to get depending on some of your business models. It was one of the things that really uh drew me to starting a little home bakery in my kitchen is because I knew that it was a product people would come back to each and every week, much like flowers and much like vegetables.

[00:10:15]Hey friends, I'm popping in real quick with something that I think is going to be exceptionally valuable. If you've landed on this video, that must mean that you are thinking about turning your home into a bakery or a micro bakery.

[00:10:28]Now, my sourdough journey started back in 2020. It was gluten intolerances that I had that led me to talking to a nutritionist who introduced me into sourdough. And literally from 2020, I learned how to bake and twice a week I was baking fresh bread for me and my family and completely got rid of all of our gluten issues. But you guys know it wasn't until a couple weeks ago I decided, you know what? Why can I not start a home bakery, offer a bread CSA on farm, and show up to the farmers market each week for my community? It has been absolutely mind-blowing how just wonderful the experience has been, but also the income potential that has come from it. I want you to know though, every single recipe I have made came from my cookbook, a taste of sourdough, the classic artisinal loaf, the fkaca, the baguettes, everything you could imagine, I put into my cookbook. There are over 60 plus recipes. So, if you find yourself wanting to bake bread for your own family for the health reasons, maybe you have your own gluten intolerances, or maybe you're watching this video because you're like, "Heck, I think I can do that. I actually think I can supplement income and maybe I can even quit my job. I really encourage you guys to grab this cookbook. Use these as your recipes and your guides on what to bake and what to sell. So, if you guys are interested, I'm going to put the link for these down in the description below. I would love to ship one right to your door so you can start your baking journey and start bringing in some extra income for you and your family. All right, let's get back to the video. For my fkacas, I do them in 9 by two aluminum round pans. It just works the best. I can fit six in my home oven. I do 815 g per container. So once my dough is bulk fermented overnight, I weigh them out. I do a healthy dose of olive oil because I don't want the aluminum to um you know, you can stick a bit more.

[00:12:23]So, I choose to use an aluminum pan knowing I have to use a little bit more um olive oil, but I find it's great.

[00:12:32]It's easy for them to reheat. So, essentially what happens is I just kind of have this conveyor belt going, right?

[00:12:38]So, I take all of my stuff, I move it to the end of the table to proof. So proofing is definitely a challenge I would say because you're not really relying on a clock. Um with my standard fkatcha that I'm making for my family that proof time is about an hour and a half, 2 hours. But proofing with um the oven going all day, proofing when it's hot and humid, we've got rain here all day. This is going to proof way faster. So, what I'm actually going to go ahead and do is I am just going to go ahead and start panning out the next round of fkacas. And by the time I do that, get my coffee made, preheat the oven, these will probably be ready for me to start dimpling and making dough. So, that's just kind of how my system works. Um, on Friday I do have child care for the youngest just to make sure that no one is in the kitchen except me. Um, I don't have to worry about little hands getting into things. I'm sure that's a question a lot of you are going to ask. Well, how the heck do you do this with your toddler? I don't. So, one of my friends keeps him every Friday for me while I bake bread and then we go pick him up. So, the first 10 are prepped. Let's move on to the next 10. And then we'll just keep this cycle going. Once I get everything off of the racks, I will use these racks to then dry everything in. So, they'll just come out of the oven. They'll go on this rack and right here. So, one thing I learned early on is that you definitely want your bread to completely cool down um before you, you know, package it or anything. So, we'll actually label all of our lids first. Um, and then when everything cools this afternoon, we'll go in and we will uh package everything.

[00:14:40]Label everything. All right, another 10 done and proofing. So, now I am going to preheat my oven. I can bake six loaves of fkatcha in my gas range. I bake it at 425° at the 15minute mark. I will go in and swap out the outside fkacas and turn the back one slightly and then it bakes again for another 15 minutes. My oven does have a confection baking setting which makes it bake more easily and super consistently each bake. So, while the oven is preheating at this point and I'm out of table space to be able to prep anymore, this is where I would go ahead and get seasonings out. Typically, I'm prepping all of my ingredients the day before. So this week we are doing a um couple sea salt, a few everything bagel seasoning, garlic, parmesan, and jalapeno cheddar. So I would be shredding all of my cheeses, chopping up my jalapenos, everything like that. So all that prep gets done uh the night before and stored in the refrigerator.

[00:15:48]Kind of multitasking. You can kind of use your proofing windows to your advantage to get some of the other things done. Um I am going to be bringing out my laptop. I'm going to be fixing labels, getting those printed.

[00:16:00]So, just use your downtime wisely. I found that works really, really well for me specifically. This is probably the section I'd spend the most time on. A lot of people think the hardest part of running a home bakery is making the bread. I actually think it's finding the customers because you can bake the most beautiful loaf in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, it doesn't matter. So, if I were starting over today, I'd focus on one thing, becoming known for one product and one community.

[00:16:29]I wouldn't try to sell everywhere, and I wouldn't try to be in every market. And I wouldn't try to serve everyone. I'd pick one market, one town, one pickup location, and I'd show up consistently because consistency is going to build trust, and trust is going to create repeat customers. And we all know that repeat customers create predictable income. And so most successful home bakers aren't built on cons constantly finding new customers. So for instance, we started a bread CSA model. That is where our menu drops every Sunday. Our customers have two days to place their orders and then they can pick up the following Friday. That didn't actually perform super well. Not in the way that I thought it would anyways because we have one stumbling block for that method. We live really rural. Someone would have to go out of their way to come to our farm to pick up their bread each week, which is why we considered adding in a new location. We decided because we are so rural, I would go to where the customer base was. We signed up for a local farmers market and we're selling out every single week. Now, if you live in an urban setting, a bread CSA might be a good option. A roadside stand might be an incredible option. You might find some local businesses to partner with and do drop off locations.

[00:17:51]Or maybe you're like me and you found that a couple hours at a farmers market every Saturday is worth your time and attention.

[00:18:04]>> The goal isn't actually selling bread.

[00:18:07]The goal is becoming part of someone's routine. When a customer buys a loaf once, obviously that's great. But when they buy a loaf every Saturday for the next 6 months, that's where your business starts becoming predictable.

[00:18:22]Some of our customers know exactly what they're buying before they even arrive at the market. They know what flavors they want. They know what flavors they missed out on last week. They know what they're hoping I'll be bringing next week. That really is the value of a repeat customer because you're no longer convincing someone to buy a loaf of bread from you. You're just simply fulfilling on an expectation.

[00:18:44]>> Another 10 preps.

[00:18:47]Now, what am I supposed to do?

[00:18:52]I was caught up in your landscape.

[00:19:14]Now, let's chat through what to sell.

[00:19:18]Now, much like all my advice across all streams of income that we have here on property, it's to start small, right? If you are baking in your home oven, you're already going to be slightly overwhelmed, right? Just because it's something new, you've never done it before. For me, math is not my strong suit. So, that was by far the most overwhelming part of this entire process is trying to figure out how much dough I make. How much can I make per batch? My timing all of all of those. Because one thing that um I certainly did not realize when I was making one or two loaves at a time is the bigger the batch is, the faster that it ferments. But if you're already slightly overwhelmed with just how the process changes going from one or two loaves to 50, 100 loaves, you don't want to add a ton of variety. Now, the classic artisal loaves I could certainly do. I just know my market. We have three sourdough vendors at the farmers market and they are all doing the classic artisal loaf because I knew that I did not want to compete with a market that was already, in my opinion, saturated. So what I did is I offered something that no one else did. I chose to make four fkaca flavors each week and I also do a French loaf. So I chose to do something different because it separates me from the rest of my market.

[00:20:40]So I encourage you guys if farmers market is where you're wanting to sell, maybe go to that farmers market, see the type of vendors there. If you're doing some sort of pre-order roadside stand, that's slightly different, but the advice is still the same. Do not overwhelm yourself. The reason I do fkacas is I can bake six in my oven at a time. I can change the flavor seasonally which offers a lot of diversity and and it's relatively easy for me to do. In fact, it is one of the easiest sourdough breads that I make and it yields me a high price point, the same as a artisal loaf with half the amount of time. So, be mindful of that. Start small. Figure out what you know you can produce well and then just rinse and repeat the process. And if you made it this far, this is probably what you were looking forward to the entire video and what I promised you, the numbers. I am a numbers girl. Now, there are so many things about this lifestyle I love and I just do because it brings me joy. But I've also found a way to make it profitable. And in fact, it has to be profitable or I really can't do it. Um, in terms of this, right? Not saying I can't just bake bread for my family and that be enough, but I couldn't bake a 100 loaves every single week with all the time and attention it takes if it's not actually yielding me money. Okay, now this is going to change based off of where you are. If you are in California doing this, you're probably going to be able to sell sourdough bread for $20 a loaf. I am in Arkansas. I cannot get those prices, but I will tell you at our farmers market, gluten-free artisal sourdough is going for $20 a loaf. And regular sourdough is going for $17 a loaf. Now, I'll be honest. I could charge more for my bread. I could, but I also want this lifestyle, whether that's the bread that I'm baking, the produce that I'm growing, or the flowers that are gracing people's table to be accessible. I don't want to outpric myself the customer group that I want. I am my own target audience, which is a really, really good place to be. So, what that looks like when it comes to pricing things is I ask myself, well, what would I be willing to pay for it?

[00:22:49]I'm not charging more just because I can, right? I want to be ethical. I want to be mindful. I want good food available to common local folks. So, I price my basics, so the ones that don't require a lot out of me or the flavors are a little simpler. So, that would be my sea salt and my everything bagel. I price those at $11. Then my specialty ones, right? So that would be my garlic parmesan, my jalapeno cheddar, my tomato basil. Those things I sell for $12. And then my cinnamon roll fkatcha, which is a bit more, right, as far as time commitment for me. It has an icing. It's a little bit of a specialty loaf. That goes for $14. Okay. And then my French loaves I sell for $10. So I have figured out how to bake enough to yield a certain amount at the farmers market each week. Every single week I've made between 1300 and almost $1,900.

[00:23:44]Now I do sell more than just bread, right? We've got our sourdough cookbooks. We have our sourdough starter. We have our banitins. We have our utensils. I do bring things like that at the market as well. If I did not have those things, I would just bake a couple extra loaves to hit the target price that I want. But we are set to make at least 6,000 plus each month on bread at the farmers market baking at this 100 plus loaf margin. One thing I think is really important to understand when you're running a home bakery is that profitability isn't just about what you sell. It's about how efficiently you're using your time. For example, whether I bake 79 loaves or 128 loaves, a lot of my costs stay exactly the same.

[00:24:30]I'm still feeding my starter. I'm still mixing dough. I'm still preheating ovens and I have to drive to the market. I'm still spending roughly the same amount of time setting up and selling. So, the more bread I can produce within that same time frame, the more profitable every hour becomes. So, let's look at what happens if I maximize my production capacity and bake 128 loaves. For this example, let's assume I sold a mix of my most popular products. So, 22 cinnamon roll fkatchas at $14 each. I'm going to do 53 specialty flavors at $12 each and 53 sea salt loaves at $11 each. That would generate a total of $1,527 in gross sales from one single baking site. Then there is expenses, right?

[00:25:19]That includes things like flour, olive oil, honey, toppings, packaging, heck, even the gas to run my oven. Altogether, my hard costs come in at about $124, which means only about 8% of my revenue is tied up in ingredients and supplies.

[00:25:37]That is one of the reasons bread can be such an attractive product to sell. The ingredient costs are relatively low compared to the retail value. But then I also have to pay myself. And this is where I think a lot of small businesses um can make mistakes, right? They forget to account for their own labor. Even if you're the owner, your time has value.

[00:25:56]For this example, let's say I work 14 hours and I paid myself $25 per hour.

[00:26:01]That comes out to $350 in labor. In other words, before I ever calculate profit, I've already paid myself a fair wage for my time. After paying for ingredients, packaging fuel, and paying myself for labor, the business would still have just over $1,50 left over.

[00:26:18]That's a true business profit. That money can be used for upgrading equipment, expanding production, reinvesting into the business, or simply paying yourself as the owner. Another key point that I think is worth making, this is not passive income. You are trading time for money. And in most cases, I would kind of teach against that, right? I would encourage you to find those things that can just make you money while you sleep. But I am a farmer by trade. I'm running a business with my family. Not all the things we do can you set up passively, but you can set up systems to make them efficient, right?

[00:26:56]My garden requires a lot out of me. We grow about 80% of our family's food needs, and we also sell locally to our community. While someone has to actually be planting, pruning, harvesting that.

[00:27:08]It's not passive, but I've set up a system to make it efficient and easy and to cut my time down. That is currently what I'm trying to figure out with Sourdough. We're putting everything in spreadsheets. I'm figuring out my time.

[00:27:21]I'm figuring out those systems and I'm figuring out how to make it more and more efficient each week that passes.

[00:27:26]You have to remember, I am sharing with you as a startup home baker. I've only been doing this for the last five weeks.

[00:27:33]I do not know what I'm doing, but I do know that what I have been doing has been working. It's been making me money, and it's been bringing back my customers each week. So, I say that to encourage you. If I can do it, so can you. So, the fact that I've gotten my profit margin above 50% tells me that it's still worth doing. So, before I end, I want to leave you with this. I want to encourage you to do it scared. Now, I had no idea what I was doing when I transitioned from a couple loaves twice a week to baking a 100 plus in my home kitchen. It terrified the mess out of me. I spent hours and hours and hours trying to figure out the math, questioning, can I actually do this? Do I actually know how to bake? The very first time I did it, I did it so scared. I was terrified they weren't baked through. I was afraid no one was going to like them. I didn't know how to set up a booth, but I did it anyways because anything worth doing is worth doing scared. I think I am a great representation of what that looks like and I hope to encourage you as well. The more you do it, the less scary it will become over time. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this video, it's that you don't need a storefront, a commercial bakery, or even a massive amount of money to get started. What you need is a product people genuinely enjoy, a willingness to learn, and the consistency to show up week after week.

[00:28:56]When I first started baking bread, I wasn't thinking about production schedules, profit margins, or scaling a business. I simply enjoyed the process and wanted to share something I loved with other people. Over time though, those loves turned into repeat customers. Those repeat customers turned into predictable income and little by little, what started as a hobby became a meaningful part of our farm and our family's income. If you've been sitting on this idea of starting a home bakery, my advice is simple. Start small. You don't need every piece of equipment. You don't need 10 different products. And you don't need everything figured out on day one. Start with one great product, serve people well, and let the business grow from there. And who knows, the loaf of bread you break this week could be the beginning of something much bigger than you ever imagined.