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How I Paced My Microbakery Through the Thanksgiving Rush | Episode 42

  • Dec 4, 2024
  • 8 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


My first holiday season in business, I offered way too much for Thanksgiving and completely burned myself out. By December I had nothing left, so I put out a very minimal holiday menu and almost certainly left money on the table.


So the following year I went into November with one instruction for myself: conserve energy for Thanksgiving and get to December with something in the tank. That one decision shaped my menu, my inventory caps, my marketing, and how the prep days actually felt.


Scaling back on purpose, and watching revenue dip on purpose

My normal rhythm is weekly porch pickups on Thursdays plus the second and fourth Saturday markets. A usual pickup menu is plain loaves, sandwich bread, focaccia, two inclusion breads, a scone, and cookies. For the three non-Thanksgiving pickups, I cut that to my regular loaves, sandwich loaves, focaccia, one inclusion bread, one cookie, and one type of scone.


My revenue was lower those weeks. Fewer orders, a slightly lower average order value, and I landed at the bottom of my normal weekly range.


That part matters, so let me say it plainly. I was not blindsided by a slower week. I chose the smaller menu, I predicted the smaller number, and it landed exactly where I expected. A revenue dip you planned feels completely different from one that surprises you.


If you are heading into a heavy season, decide now which weeks get the short menu, and write down the number you expect those weeks to bring in. Calculating your capacity for markets and pre-orders is the piece that makes those numbers real.


The prep systems that saved a bake day

One of those pickup weeks, my assistant Melissa had a sick kiddo and I ran the whole day solo. It was fine, and only because of two things. I had scaled the menu back, and we had done the prep days ahead. Melissa had labeled all our bags and we had preprinted labels, so on the day itself all I had to do was bake everything off and package it.


Getting my prep off the day-of has been the slowest habit for me to build and probably the highest return. Printing labels while your bread is cooling is a terrible use of the one morning where everything is time sensitive. Name every task on your bake day that does not have to happen that morning, move all of it earlier in the week, and your solo days stop being emergencies.


Thanksgiving: holding the inventory cap

I opened my Thanksgiving menu about three weeks ahead. The dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls sold out within the first hour.


I always hate selling out that fast, because I know people are disappointed. It was very tempting to add more inventory for everyone who missed out. I had set that cap at a number that felt realistic for my energy, so I held it, told those customers I was sorry, and let them know the dinner rolls would be back on the Christmas menu. If you have never set caps like that, I walk through how in Holiday Menu Planning for Sourdough Bakers.


The menu itself was short. Plain loaves, plain loaves shaped like little pumpkins, dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, and cookies.


It beat my previous porch pickup sales record by about a hundred dollars, and I could have roughly doubled that. All I did to market it was send one text when the menu opened, and I could have set my inventory limits much higher. I chose not to, and I am still glad.


Here is the part I did not expect. Prep day turned into one of my favorite days of the year. I got up early to shape the cinnamon rolls, Melissa came at nine, and a couple of hours later her husband and little one came too. Our husbands are both firefighters, so they talked shop while the kids played and we packed orders out onto the porch. We decided on the spot to make that our holiday tradition.


That day only existed because I had margin built into the plan. A menu I could actually deliver is what bought me a joyful morning instead of a frantic one.


Two markets, two completely different days

My market is two minutes from my house, which I count as a real business advantage. Whenever I sell there I tell people I am local and take orders for local pickup, and that market is a big part of how my porch pickup list grew.


The first market was slow. Low foot traffic, lots of browsing, and I brought home about 20 of the 100 loaves I took. So I put them on the shelf on my porch and posted a flash sale in my local neighborhood Facebook group, telling people to come take what they wanted and pay what they could. A few went. Then I posted the same thing on my business Facebook page and they were gone within about an hour.


I do not sweat unsold bread anymore. Every loaf still goes to a home, I recoup what I spent on ingredients, and bread lands in the hands of people who have never bought from me before. That is brand awareness I did not pay for.


The second market sold out. Beautiful weather, an open house on the market grounds, and a lot of people in town for Thanksgiving. I brought about 80 loaves and was sold out of bread by noon, with the cookies and scones gone an hour before closing.


How I build a market menu

My market menu barely changes, and that consistency is deliberate.

  • Regular bread, sandwich bread, and focaccia every single time. Those are the staples people ask for over and over.

  • Usually four inclusion breads, two savory and two sweet. Jalapeno cheddar is permanent, because people get genuinely upset if I do not bring it.

  • The rest rotate, and I use one of those spots to test something new.

  • Cookies and scones every time. Chocolate chip is my constant, and that month I tried the same base with white chocolate, cranberries, and walnuts.

New flavors are almost always the last thing to sell, because people are not sure about them yet. Then the following week those same customers come back and ask me to bring it again. A market is a very cheap way to test a product before you commit to it on a pre-order menu. Bring a handful, tell people it is new, and ask what they think.


One packaging note. At the market I pack cookies and scones in twos, because people want a grab and go option while they walk around. I save the bigger quantities for pickups.


What the month taught me

Cold houses under proof dough. As the weather turned I started using warmer water and got a cover for my speed rack, so dough was not sitting at cold room temperature all day.


Do not freeze dinner rolls too far ahead. I prepped my first round almost a full month in advance. They rose enough to bake and were not up to my standard. Past about two weeks in the freezer they need gentle heat to wake up, and past three or four weeks they may never fully rise. Two weeks ahead is the rule of thumb I landed on.


Communicate a changed pickup window everywhere. My Thanksgiving pickup ran on a different day and a slightly later window, and a handful of people showed up early. The only place I had said so was the automatic text from my pre-order app. When you move a pickup window, say it in the app, in a text, and on social, because your regulars are running on muscle memory.


Something at 70 percent beats nothing. I caught a cold that month and did not have an episode recorded, and I nearly skipped a week. Instead I wrote out my bullet points, used a tool to help shape them into a draft, then went back and put my own voice into it. It ended up being one of the episodes that resonated most with all of you. Perfectionism has stopped me from shipping plenty of things, and 70 percent out in the world does more good than 100 percent sitting in your head. Your customers will never know it was not your best day. They will only know you showed up.


The planning morning, for the operator a few years in

I took a night alone at a hotel for my birthday, which as an introvert is my favorite gift on earth, and used the morning to look back at the year and set goals for the next quarter. If you are a year or more into this and have never done that, block the time. Not a whole retreat, just one morning with a notebook and an honest look at the past twelve months.


That morning is where I named the thing I had been avoiding. I had gone silent on social media because I was at my capacity and did not want to bring in customers I could not serve well. That is a reasonable instinct, and it is also how you slowly stop talking to the people who already love you. My focus for the year ahead became loyalty with the customers I already had, and then a slow, deliberate trickle of new ones.


December got the same treatment. I planned to push harder than November while drawing clear boundaries, because our family watches Christmas movies a couple of evenings a week and I wanted that on the calendar as much as the bake days.


Final thoughts

The most useful thing I did in November was decide, out loud and in advance, what I was willing to give up. Lower revenue on three slower weeks. A hundred more dollars I could have made at Thanksgiving. A few disappointed customers who missed the dinner rolls.


Every one of those trades bought me a prep day full of firefighters and kids in my kitchen, and enough energy to enjoy December instead of survive it. That is a very good deal!


Look at your own next eight weeks and decide what you are willing to trade, then hold the line when it gets tempting.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If monthly recaps help you think through your own numbers, these are good next listens.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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