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How to Add Revenue Streams to Your Sourdough Microbakery | Episode 141

2 days ago
9 min read

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Online revenue follows an audience. It does not go out and build you one for you. That is the part the internet conveniently leaves out, and it matters a lot for how you should actually think about adding income streams to your bakery.


This question came in through a SpeakPipe voicemail from Lindsay of Lindsay Bakes Bread, who asked something a lot of us have wondered: what are the options for building additional income beyond baking bread, and how do you know which one actually makes sense for you? It is such a smart question, and the second half of it, figuring out what is right for your specific life, is where most of the real answer lives.


I want to organize this by one simple thing: how much each option depends on you baking, and how much it depends on you being physically in the room.


Category one: bread-adjacent products you can make ahead

This category covers everything that happens because you are already open and already selling bread, without requiring more bake-day effort. The common thread across all of it is shelf stability, products you can batch on a slow afternoon that are not on the clock the way fresh bread is.


Dry mixes are a big one, pancake mixes, brownie mixes, even a layered cookie mix if you want to develop a recipe for it. Spice blends work well too, I make an herb dipping spice mix that pairs naturally with a loaf and some olive oil. Simmer pots make a fun gift idea heading into the holidays, and preserves, jams and jellies are a great option if you already can. None of these have to happen during the chaos of your actual bake week. You make them on a slow afternoon in September, and they sit ready to sell straight through the holiday months. I like bundling several of these together into gift boxes, along with things like the vanilla extract I mentioned making a few episodes back.


The second piece of this category is merchandise you do not make at all, you buy it wholesale and resell it. I use a platform called Faire for a lot of mine, things like canvas market bags, bone broth, tea concentrates and kombucha, plus supplies for people taking my workshops, bannetons, lames, bread slings, weck jars. Before you go this route, check your own state's cottage food laws and sales tax requirements. Selling something like bread bags or beeswax wraps from a home kitchen may be handled completely differently than selling the same item from a storefront, and it is worth knowing that before you buy inventory.


The real risk with wholesale merchandise is the upfront investment. Instead of baking, selling and getting paid inside the same week, you are spending money ahead of time with no guarantee it sells. I bought some books and notepads for my retail shelves that have sold very slowly, more than a year later a handful are still sitting there. On the other hand, I restock The Perfect Loaf Cookbook constantly, since nearly every workshop I teach sells a couple of copies, and bannetons and weck jars move quickly around workshop days too. Know your own cash position before you commit to a wholesale order.


The third piece is food that gets frozen or sold cold, and this one absolutely depends on your own state's cottage food laws, more states restrict this than allow it. Here in Texas, I can sell frozen cookie dough, refrigerated pizza dough and pre-bottled lattes without ice, as long as everything stays at a safe temperature and is labeled correctly. I recently added canned kombucha with a long shelf life, sold from a small reach-in cooler at the storefront, and this same setup would still be compliant at a market or a porch pop-up here in Texas. Research your own state before assuming any of this applies to you.


Everything in category one is really an average order value booster. I track average order value closely and look for ways to nudge it up even by a dollar. Linear thinking says two loaves is twice the revenue of one loaf, and the only way up is more loaves. Average order value thinking asks a different question: how do I make the customer who is already here worth more, without baking a single additional thing? A five dollar kombucha, a five dollar latte, or a thirty dollar container of cookie dough added onto an order is a real revenue boost that never touched your oven!


The limitation across this whole category is that you still have to be in the room. Someone has to be open, whether that is a market, a farm stand or a storefront, for any of this to sell.


Category two: in-person revenue that skips the bake day entirely

This category still requires you to show up in person, but it does not require a bake day at all. You are trading your expertise instead of a baked product, and the clearest version of this is teaching in-person workshops.


Here is the math worth sitting with. Teach eight to twelve people at around $100 a ticket, and you are looking at roughly $1,000 for a three-hour class, plus some prep and cleanup on either end. Compare that to what it actually takes to generate $1,000 on a full production day, and workshops come out dramatically ahead on hands-on time.


The real limitation is that most people buy your beginner workshop exactly once. If beginner sourdough is the only class you offer, you need a constant stream of brand new customers forever. Kala Hembree, who I interviewed back in Episode 29, solves this by offering a whole series of workshops people can buy individually or on a subscription, pretzels, bagels, tortillas, so a customer who came for beginner sourdough has a reason to come back for something else entirely. That turns a one-off workshop model into something much closer to recurring revenue.


Workshops are a genuinely strong option if you are limited in how many days you can bake for production, or if you want to be. You could scale back to two bake days a month and teach one or two workshops on the opposite weeks, and those workshop weeks carry far less stress than a full production day, an hour of prep, the teaching itself, then cleanup.


Category three: online revenue, and why it takes longer than the

internet promises

This category does not require baking or being anywhere in person at all, but there is no version of it that happens fast. The internet wants you to believe you can throw together a Canva graphic and sell thousands of dollars worth of product in a month. It happens for someone occasionally, and that person gets a lot of hype online. The far more common reality is that online revenue follows an audience that already trusts you, and if you do not have that audience yet, building it is the actual first step, not a side quest.


If you are starting from zero, show up consistently, post a number of times a week you can genuinely sustain, and let people get to know you as a real person and a business owner before you try to sell them anything. Pay close attention to what people keep asking you about. That repeated question, whether it is about your process, your setup, or something you would never have guessed, is what eventually becomes your first product.


Once you have that clarity, start small. A digital ebook made in Canva, a short recorded video series, even an email course delivered over a few days, are all lower-risk starting points than a full video course. I would actually caution you against building something large and expensive before you have a proven audience for it, since that is a lot of hours to pour into something with no confirmed buyer.


Before any of that works, you need a way to actually collect email addresses. I use Flodesk for this. You offer something free in exchange for an email address, deliver it automatically, and from there you own that audience the same way I always talk about owning your text list for the bakery itself. An online audience you do not own on a platform you do not control is not really yours!


On AI specifically, since it is part of this conversation now whether we like it or not: the rule I would give you is that it should package your own expertise, never replace your thinking. People can tell the difference between real experience and generic, AI-flattened content almost instantly, and that is the fastest way to lose trust you worked hard to build. My own approach was to take hundreds of hours of my actual podcast episodes and teaching, build them into a searchable base of my own words, and use that to generate something like a custom coaching plan for bakers who fill out a questionnaire. It is not searching the internet for generic advice. It is pulling from what I have actually taught, in the way I would actually say it.


The other online path is affiliate income, referral links, and brand partnerships, and I will be upfront that this is the area I know the least about myself. When I do share links, they are usually affiliate links for products I already use, my Amazon storefront being the main example, and it took over a year of sharing somewhat consistently before I saw any meaningful revenue from it. Plenty of brands in this space run their own affiliate programs too, typically paying somewhere around 10 to 15 percent. None of this is a get-rich-quick path, but for someone willing to build the audience first, it adds up as a real, if slow, revenue stream over time.


How to decide which one is actually right for you

This comes down to three things: your goals, your capacity, and what your family needs. Sit down and sketch a one-year, three-year and five-year vision, not written in stone, just something to aim at, and get clear on the actual number you want to earn in a month and in a year.


Here is the method I would use. Say you want $3,000 in profit deposited into your family account every month, and with your current bake-day setup, maxed out, you are landing around $2,000. That $1,000 gap is your answer, and I would look hard at workshops first, since they carry a much higher margin and a much shorter runway than online education or affiliate income. If what you actually want is long-term, mostly hands-off revenue built around an online brand, then the honest answer is to start building that trust today, with a realistic timeline. In most cases it takes close to a year before an online income stream produces anything notable. There are exceptions, but it is not $1,000 in a month the way a single workshop can be.


Get clear on four things before you choose: your goals for your business and your family, the actual number you are aiming for in a given month, your real physical capacity to bake, and then look at which of the three categories above genuinely fits the life you are trying to build, not the one that sounds most impressive online.


Already have an audience? This part is for you

If you already have an established online following the way Lindsay does, you are further along than you might realize. Real business expertise, the ability to communicate it clearly, and a runway of consistent posting that had to start somewhere are exactly what makes affiliate partnerships, digital products or brand deals viable now instead of theoretical. If you are starting from zero, everyone with an audience today had a day one too. Be honest with yourself about the timeline, then start showing up consistently anyway, because that consistency is the whole engine.


Final thoughts

There is no single right answer here, and that is kind of the point. The bakers who get this right are not the ones chasing every income stream at once. They are the ones who got honest about their own goals, their own capacity, and what their household actually needs, and picked the one stream that matched.


Cheering you on,

Caroline


Keep going

If this got you thinking about where your next dollar could come from, these three go further.


Links to things you might like!


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

 
 
 

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