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How I Built a Sourdough Microbakery in My First Year | Episode 5

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Let me tell you about my worst market day. It was opening weekend at a pumpkin patch and I was sure it would be huge. I had four sales all day.


That was terrible and it taught me more than any of my good days did. It is also the reason my markets are reliable now, because I finally learned what to ask before I said yes to one.


So here is the whole first year of my microbakery, in order, with the decisions that actually moved the business and the ones I would make sooner if I could do it again.


It started with two extra loaves and one Facebook post

I have been baking since I was small. There are pictures of me wearing nothing but an apron, baking next to my grandma. At nineteen, working a job in the middle of nowhere with no friends, I figured out that if I made chocolate chip cookies, people would come find me. Food brings people together, and I have never gotten over that.


I first tried sourdough in 2021 and it went badly. Every loaf came out a brick. I was chronically under proofing and I did not know enough to see what I was doing wrong, so after a couple of months I put it on the shelf for two years.


When I picked it back up, I did it differently. I sat with the slowness of the process, checked out library books, read everything online, watched videos, and stayed with one recipe long enough to learn how it was supposed to feel. My success rate went way up. Pretty soon I was baking more bread than my family could eat and running out of freezer space.


At the same time I was hunting for a job our family schedule could survive, which turned out to be a unicorn. We also spontaneously hosted a sixteen year old exchange student from Germany, and if you know Germans, you know they know good bread. Her compliments planted a seed I brushed off at first.


In September I had two extra loaves I was proud of. I put a photo on Facebook, wrote something conversational asking what I should do with the extra bread, and about fifty people commented that they wanted to buy some.


If you have been waiting for a sign that there is demand where you live, that post is what a market test looks like. One picture, a real question, no sales pitch.


The rules I set in the first week

I met two customers to hand off those first loaves and decided right then that I was done with delivery. I had no idea where this was going, but I knew that if I pursued it, it had to fit my actual life. Driving around town was never going to do that.


The second decision was about orders. My inbox filled up fast, and I genuinely struggle to keep up with a message box. Taking orders through comments and messages was a recipe for letting people fall through the cracks, and that is a customer service problem before it is anything else.


So I moved orders onto a simple form, posted a thank you with a link to it, and closed the form as soon as I had more orders than I could bake.


Then I set up Project Broadcast so texts came into one place instead of my personal phone, Facebook comments, and messages all at once. That gave me one inbox for customers and one way to tell everyone when my menu opened each week.


If you are starting now and you have no order system at all, look at Hotplate or the Simply Bread app. Both let you set inventory limits so you never oversell.


Capacity taught me everything, usually the hard way

I started with three bake days a week, a couple of loaves on each. That held for a few weeks and then it felt like too much, so I dropped to two bake days and took more orders per day. Much more manageable.


My first market was the third week of September, a local one a couple of minutes from my house that runs twice a month. I brought about thirty loaves and took five home. Then came the pumpkin patch and a couple of other flops.


I also over proofed a lot early on. There were mornings I baked twenty loaves for a market and could only bring ten or twelve, because the rest came out flat and sad. That is lost ingredients and lost revenue, and it is why I stopped adding products for a while and got consistent on the ones I had.


Then Thanksgiving arrived and I went big. Dinner rolls, which you shape one at a time and which take forever. A pull apart cinnamon roll bread. Regular loaves, croutons, and too much else besides. I learned more about my real capacity in that one week than in all the weeks before it.


After Thanksgiving I went down to one bake day a week because I was worn out. December was steady with a much smaller offer. January had a couple of slow weeks, which is normal, and then it evened out.


The four investments that changed my numbers

By February I had weekly pickup days plus a market every other week, and I was clearly outgrowing my kitchen. My husband and I sat down and talked about what this business was going to be, because it was taking over half our family kitchen for half of every week.


Here is what I bought, in the order I bought it.

  • A baking steel, after about three markets and six weeks of Dutch ovens. It was my first larger equipment purchase, and once I worked out open baking I could do four loaves at a time instead of two or three, with no shuffling of lids.

  • Big plastic dough bins, from a local restaurant supply store. Not expensive at all. I went from mixing two or three loaves in a bowl, with bowls sprawled across the counter, to hand mixing six or eight loaves in one bin.

  • A used double oven, $250 on Facebook Marketplace, plus an electrician to install the outlet. That outlet is the same one I will need for a bread oven later, so it was worth it either way. The oven doubled my capacity and immediately improved my sleep. Ten out of ten!

  • A dedicated fridge for dough, which is an upright freezer from Facebook Marketplace run as a refrigerator with an InkBird temperature controller. I can proof about eighty loaves in there and my family fridge is mine again!

I also took over half of the room next to our kitchen, which was a formal dining room we were using as a playroom, so I could have a dedicated prep table.


Every one of those purchases removed a bottleneck that was capping how much I could sell. That is the only test I use.


The switch I would make much sooner

The last big change was moving off a spreadsheet and manual texts and onto the Simply Bread app. I had been running everything by hand up to that point, and in hindsight I would have done this months earlier.


The app took away the manual text for every order and the constant watching of my form, because I could set inventory limits and schedule the post that went out when orders opened. It also let me switch to prepay, so I stopped tracking who owed me what and stopped losing the occasional order that slipped through unpaid. Customers who love cash still find me at the market.


If you are past your first year

The part of this story I would point you to is that I chose my pace on purpose.


This summer, with my kids home, I run the farmers market on the second and fourth Saturdays and one porch pickup on the first and third Thursdays. I could have worked more and grown faster. I decided not to, and when school starts I will hit the gas again.


Sit down this month and write two numbers. What you sold in the last four weeks, and how many hours you worked to sell it. Then decide, on purpose, whether the next quarter is a gas quarter or a slow quarter. Owning the business is what gives you that choice, so use it.


Final thoughts

I am coming up on one year of selling, and the thing I would tell September me is that the flops were the curriculum. The pumpkin patch, the flat loaves, the Thanksgiving menu I could not sustain, all of it taught me what my business could hold.


You do not need to have it figured out before you start. You need to start, pay attention to what your customers keep asking for, and protect the parts of your life you are not willing to trade.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you liked hearing how it really went, these go deeper on the story side of a bakery.


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