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9 Ways to Get Your Microbakery Ready for the Holiday Season | Episode 138

Aug 20
13 min read

Listen on Apple Podcasts


There is a two-gallon jar sitting in my bakery right now, full of vanilla beans and cheap vodka, with a piece of masking tape on the lid that just says a date in December. It is not doing anything I can see. It will not be ready to sell until the holidays, and that is the entire point.


Almost nothing that makes December go well can be started in December. If you wait until the season is already loud to plan for it, you are not planning, you are just reacting a little faster than usual.


It is the middle of August. Your customers are thinking about school supplies, and if you are anywhere near as hot as I am in Texas right now, the last thing on your mind is a Christmas gift table. But your calendar does not care how far away the holidays feel. So today I want to walk you through nine specific things I am actually doing right now in my own bakery to get ready for the holiday season, plus two more that are not holiday prep at all. Those two are for January, so that the slow month after the rush does not flatten me the way it has in past years.


Audit your menu and your prices in the same sitting

I do this regularly, but it had been a while, and I already knew one product was underpriced, so I sat down and looked hard at both my menu and my pricing at once.


Start with the menu side. Run every product through four questions.

  • Does it sell?

  • What is the actual margin on it?

  • Does it drain you to make?

  • Do you procrastinate on it?


That last one is sneaky, but your own calendar will tell you the truth. I used to put off one particular dough until the very end of my prep list every single time, dreading it for no clear reason, until I finally cut it from the menu and never looked back. On the other side of that same coin, I still bake a jalapeno cheddar loaf that I personally do not enjoy at all. Jalapenos are not my thing. But customers ask for it every single week without fail, so it stays in the rotation. The audit is not about your preferences. It is about what the data and your own resistance are telling you.


When I ran my own menu through this, I landed on the answer that it is working. I like everything I am currently offering and my customers are responding well. The one thing I do not currently have the margin for, but would like to add eventually, is one more inclusion loaf a week. For now, I am staying with my rustic sourdough, my sandwich bread, a seeded version of that same dough, one rotating inclusion loaf, a rotating daily special a few days a week, and a small handful of sweets. A limited set of doughs that I can rotate and vary, without juggling too many different flours and mix-ins at once, is what actually lets me keep quality high.


Now do the pricing side, in the same sitting. Take one recipe, calculate the cost of your ingredients all the way down to the salt, divide by how many the batch makes, and look at that number plainly next to what you charge. You do not need special software. A pen and paper or a simple spreadsheet works, and my Profit & Pricing Calculator will do the math for you if you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself.


Here is the target once you have that number: your margin should be no lower than about 70 percent on most products, and for bread specifically I aim for around 80 percent. So if a loaf costs $2 in ingredients and packaging and you price it at $10, you are keeping $8 of that $10, an 80 percent margin, and that $8 is what has to cover your overhead, your time, your taxes and savings, and your own pay.


It is incredibly common to price by looking at what other bakers charge instead of doing this math, especially early on. You see someone in a Facebook group say $4 or $5 for brownies and you land somewhere in that range because it feels right, not because you calculated it. When I finally ran my own brownies through this exercise, they were sitting at a 59 percent margin, which meant I needed to either resize them, raise the price, or cut them. That same audit is also why I bumped my granola up by a dollar this month. It had been underpriced for a while and I knew it. And I raised my muffin price too, not because the old price was wrong exactly, but because I want to pursue wholesale accounts with them in the coming months, and the old price left no room to offer a wholesale rate that still protects my margin.


When you find something underpriced, bump the price, set it a little higher than feels comfortable, and move on with your day. Do not write a post explaining it. Do not apologize. Chances are no one will say a word, and even if one customer pushes back, that is not enough feedback to build a pricing decision on.


Already selling for a while? Use this exact audit twice a year, not just once. The four menu questions and the cost-versus-price check both hold up just as well at year three as they do at year one. What changes is how much you have been avoiding one of the answers.


Put a recipe testing day on your calendar before November

Pick one day in late August or early September that is not a production day, and make it entirely about recipe testing. This is the single easiest thing on this list to skip, because it always feels optional compared to filling actual orders. Do not skip it.


That one day has two real jobs. The first is narrowing down your holiday menu. If you have eight recipes you are considering, this is the day you test all eight with your family or a small group of testers and settle on your actual top two or three, in August rather than at five in the morning on Thanksgiving week while orders are already sitting in your fridge.

The second job is finding out which items handle the freezer well, because your freezer is what buys back your busiest week of the year. Cookies, muffins, brownies and scones all bake up beautifully from frozen. I make my muffins by mixing the batter, cold fermenting it in the fridge overnight, scooping it into liners, and freezing it so I can bake straight from frozen on the day I need it. Knowing with certainty which of your products can be made ahead this way is worth an entire day of testing by itself.


There is a third job this day can do too, and it is one of my favorites. While you are already covered in flour and making something pretty, put your phone or camera on a tripod and capture footage you are normally too in the flow to bother with on an actual bake day, a slow pour, a swirl, a fun little clip. Those clips sit on your phone and get used all season long, so you are not stuck trying to shoot content in the middle of your busiest week. You can even use the day itself as marketing, a post that says you are recipe testing for the holidays and the first few people to comment get to taste and weigh in, or a poll on what people want to see.


Your homework, before this episode ends: please put an actual date on your calendar for this day.


If a holiday product needs lead time, start it this week

Some products cannot be rushed no matter how organized you are in November, and figuring out which ones those are now is a business decision, not a baking one.

My example this year is vanilla extract, which I am making for the first time to sell in small gift bundles in December. It needs somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks at minimum, sometimes closer to six months, before it is genuinely good, and it keeps improving for about a year after that. December is roughly 16 weeks out from when I am recording this, which means this was not a someday project. It had to start this week or not happen at all this year.


The actual method is simple: beans, alcohol, a jar and patience. If you want to legally call it pure vanilla extract on a label, that phrase has a real federal definition behind it, at least 35 percent alcohol, which is your standard 80 proof vodka, bourbon or rum, and roughly an ounce of beans per cup of liquid. Extracts sit in a slightly different corner of the rules than baked goods because of the alcohol, the same way we talked through last week that you cannot take one blog's word for your own state's cottage food rules. Do the same thing here. Search your own state's actual rules rather than trusting a generic answer.

As a holiday product, extract has real advantages. It is shelf stable, so it takes up almost no fridge or freezer space in the month when that space is most precious. It needs zero oven time in the week your oven is the most valuable thing you own. And it is the kind of thing people buy three of at once, one for the teacher, one for the neighbor, one for whoever is hosting dinner.


The bigger lesson here is not really about vanilla. It is about identifying anything on your holiday menu that has a built-in waiting period, and reverse engineering your start date from the day you actually need to sell it. I have also learned, the hard way, that beans and bottles and packaging bought calmly in August cost noticeably less than the same things bought in a panic in December. Planning ahead is what lets you buy at your own pace instead of paying for overnight shipping out of desperation.

If this is something you want on your own December menu, get organic vanilla beans ordered this week, since shipping alone can eat weeks of your runway. If it is too late for this year, that is a completely fine reason to give yourself permission to save the idea for next August instead.


Buy your packaging and labels now, while they are cheap

Packaging goes wrong in Q4 in exactly two ways: you run out in the middle of the season, or you end up buying whatever will arrive the fastest regardless of cost or quality. I have done both. I once bought muffin boxes in a hurry that were cheap and turned out to be an origami nightmare to assemble, and I still think about it.


The cheapest option is rarely the best option, and the rushed option almost never is. Right now, I keep a running list of the specific products I reorder on a cycle, and if I notice the price drop even a few cents, I stock up. I currently have a thousand red bags sitting on a shelf because I bought them when they were cheap. Holiday labels are worth the same approach. They are inexpensive now, and if you design your own, this is the month to do it, because by December the selection thins out, the shipping slows down, and the price goes up.


It also helps to simplify your packaging formats generally, fewer sizes of boxes and bags means bigger individual orders and better pricing per unit, rather than juggling a dozen small orders across a dozen formats.


Your homework: count what you actually have on hand, then buy the one item you always seem to run out of, and think ahead about whether you need holiday-specific labels this year.


Get your workshop tickets live before people start Christmas shopping

This might be the single most profitable thing on this entire list, and it is also the one I personally missed last year, which is why it is front and center for me this time.

A workshop ticket makes a genuinely great gift. Someone can buy a ticket in October or November for a class you are actually teaching in January or February, which means the cash lands in your busiest month while the class itself happens in your slowest one. The only thing standing between you and that is having the ticket page actually live and purchasable before people start their holiday shopping. Nobody can buy your class as a gift if the page does not exist yet!


If workshops are new to you entirely, go listen to Episode 29 with Kala Hembree, who had taught well over 1,800 people to bake bread as of that recording and is brilliant at this whole model.


Look ahead at staffing so you hire before you are desperate

This applies just as much to home bakers as it does to anyone with a storefront. The whole point of thinking about staffing in August is to bring someone on before you are already underwater, because training genuinely requires a slowdown, and trying to train someone during your most chaotic week is how you end up teaching a new process while your dough is overproofing in the background.


The easiest tasks to hand off first are the ones outside your actual doughs, things like crackers, cookies, dishes and packaging. Save your sourdough itself for later, one dough at a time, once there is room to teach it properly. Do not hand someone your whole bread lineup the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.


Last Thanksgiving, I had an assistant help with dinner rolls. I rolled, he cut and weighed, and between the two of us we produced 820 dinner rolls in just a few hours, without the frantic moments I have had in past holiday seasons. Help buys you margin and breathing room, and it is really worth the investment. If I could go back, the one thing I would change is not waiting so long to hire, and not waiting so long to write my processes down, because no one can help you with something that only exists inside your own head.

Your homework: write down one process this week in enough detail that someone else could actually follow it without asking you a single question. If that feels like too much, a single walkthrough where you talk someone through it once is a fine start too.

If you are getting close to needing help for the first time, Episode 111 walks through exactly this decision in more depth.


Consider sponsoring one small local event before the rush

This one I am still deciding on myself, but it is worth mentioning. My version of this is small, something like a local Chamber of Commerce style event where I can show up with coffee and muffins and meet other local business owners, with no big campaign attached to it.


The value here is not usually a direct sales spike. Last January, I taught a workshop for a group of local women business owners and did not walk away with a stack of orders that day, but I walked away feeling grounded, motivated and less alone, and those same relationships have sent referrals and collaborations my way in the months since.


Keep the same proximity filter you already use for choosing markets. The people in the room need to be close enough to realistically become a customer on a Thursday. An interesting event an hour away is still the wrong event if the people there are not your people, even if it might generate a one-day bump. September or October is the window to line this up, before the holiday season eats your calendar.


January is where next year actually gets built

The last two things on this list are not holiday prep at all. They are how I set up January so it does not flatten me after everything else, and they matter just as much.

January is predictably one of the slower months, both in revenue and in customer traffic, and it is also the month you are holding the most honest information about your business all year. You know exactly what sold, what nearly broke you, and what you never want to make again. It is very easy to let all of that knowledge just evaporate instead of acting on it.


The first thing I am doing with that slow month is investing financially in my own growth. In January, I am attending the Proof Bread Intensive in Arizona with John and Amanda, learning hands-on inside their bakery. I am entirely self-taught, library books, YouTube, forums, three years of figuring it out on my own, and I have never taken a single baking class in my life. But the gap in my skills now is not the same gap I had when I started, and closing it needs someone further ahead of me, in person. When I put real money behind something like this, it changes how I show up for it. Learning something for free "one of these days" is a lot easier to keep postponing than something I have already paid for. I keep a line in my budget for education specifically, as a real business expense rather than a reward I have to earn first. I am not affiliated with Proof in any way, they invited me to attend, and I will be sharing what I learn as I go.


The second thing is one I have been sitting on for weeks and am genuinely excited to finally say out loud: I am hosting my own retreat for bakers, January 24th through 27th, in Dripping Springs, Texas, just outside Austin. It is built around action, implementation, dreaming, planning and real rest, including some fully unstructured time, and it is limited to about sixteen bakers sharing one house together, so this first one will be women only. It is not for the very beginner. It is built for bakers who are actively scaling a home-based business, or who are considering, or already living inside, the move into a commercial space. Pricing, what is included, and the waitlist are all coming very soon, so keep an eye out.


Final thoughts

None of these nine things feel urgent in August, and that is exactly why they are worth doing in August. The version of you standing in your kitchen in the second week of December will be very glad the version of you in the second week of August already made these calls.


Pick just one. Whichever one feels like it would make the biggest difference to your holiday season, put it on your calendar today, and then come tell me which one you picked. I would love to hear it! And do not skip January just because it feels far away right now. That slower month is exactly where next year gets built, one honest decision at a time, instead of just happening to you.


On a much smaller note, I picked up knitting this summer on a family road trip, mostly to practice being a beginner at something again with absolutely no plan to ever turn it into a product. It has been a nice reminder that not everything you learn has to become part of the business.


Cheering you on,

Caroline


Keep going

If this got you thinking further ahead than just this season, these three go deeper.


Links to things you might like!


Sourdough microbakery owner looking back at lessons from her first year selling bread

 
 
 

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