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Meal Prep for Microbakery Owners, with Cassy Joy Garcia | Episode 144

12 hours ago
7 min read

Listen on Apple Podcasts


A business that is actually built to last does not just need a solid pricing strategy and a reliable pre-order system. It needs you still standing at the end of it, fed, rested enough, and not running on fumes. That is why I wanted to bring Cassy Garcia onto the show.


Cassy is the New York Times bestselling author of The Protein Meal Prep Plan, Cook Once Dinner Fix, and Cook Once Eat All Week, and she started the Fed and Fit blog back in 2011 to share what she was learning about healthy living before growing it into a full wellness brand. I have personally cooked from Cook Once Eat All Week almost every single week for years, and it changed how my household handles dinner. She lives right here near me in San Antonio with her husband and three daughters, and she brought so much to this conversation that applies directly to running a microbakery, even though her world is meal prep, not sourdough.


You are the only real expert on your own business

One of the most useful things Cassy said was about marketing, and I think almost every microbakery owner needs to hear it. She described the constant temptation to assume someone else, some marketing expert, must know how to talk about her business better than she does. Her conclusion, after years of handing that job to outside experts, is that it is almost never true. You are the most well-equipped person to tell the story of your own business, because nobody else has lived inside it the way you have.


So many of you reading this did not set out to start a business at all. You wanted to feed your family good bread, know what was actually in your ingredients, and it slowly turned into a bakery. That means you are doing your own marketing, your own pricing, your own everything, usually without a background in any of it, and it is easy to feel like an impostor the whole time. Cassy's point stands just as well for a loaf of sourdough as it does for a cookbook. Nobody understands your customers, your story and your bread the way you do, and that intuition cannot be outsourced.


Stop discounting your wins as a fluke

Cassy also talked about a pattern she sees often in people, especially women, who spend their days in service to everyone else. We tend to brush off our own wins instead of actually noticing them. A great month, a strong launch, a product that suddenly takes off, it is tempting to file that under luck instead of under something you built on purpose.


Her fix is refreshingly simple. She texts her husband the moment something good happens instead of waiting to tell him in person later, because waiting usually means it gets lost in the shuffle of the day. She has also told the people closest to her directly that she needs help celebrating, and she has asked them to remind her how good she actually is at this when she forgets. For the bigger wins, she does something small and tangible for herself, nothing extravagant required, just something that marks the moment.


If you tend to shrug off your own wins the way she described, borrow this. Tell someone the second it happens. Ask the people in your life to help you notice your own progress. Building a team of people who help you celebrate is not vanity, it is a genuine tool for staying in this business for the long haul.


The one prep day that actually feeds your family during bake week

Here is the part of our conversation I asked for most directly, because it is the exact spot where so many of you get stuck. Picture the week most of you live: two or three days prepping dough, a full day of baking, then a full Saturday at the market, and by the end of it you are completely worn out with maybe an hour or two free on Sunday or Monday. How do you still get your family fed on real food without adding another whole project to your plate?


Cassy's answer does not require her book, a system, or any special equipment. Pick one strategic prep session and build three separate components instead of finished meals. Her own example: a pork shoulder into the slow cooker, a batch of sweet potatoes baked in the oven, and a sheet pan of roasted vegetables, all started around the same time. By the end of that one session, you have shredded pork, baked sweet potatoes and roasted vegetables sitting in the fridge, ready to mix and match into whatever the week actually needs. A loaded sweet potato with barbecue sauce one night. Those same roasted vegetables scrambled into eggs the next morning. None of it requires a plan written out in advance, and all three pieces can be started with almost no hands-on attention while you are doing other things in the kitchen.


The decisions are already made. All that is left during the busiest part of your week is assembly, not cooking from scratch.


Easy lunch tips for the day you forget to eat completely

I will admit I am one of the business owners Cassy described, the one who gets going in the morning and suddenly realizes at two in the afternoon that she has not eaten anything since breakfast. Her advice here was some of the most immediately useful of the whole conversation.


Start by treating yourself the way you already treat your kids. Most of us keep a stocked snack zone for our children, a shelf or a drawer where they know they can grab something healthy without asking. Build that same zone for yourself.


One of her favorite go-to lunches is a jar salad, built upside down in a wide-mouth mason jar. Dressing goes in the very bottom, crunchy vegetables that will not get soggy go on top of that, carrots and cucumbers work well, and anything delicate like lettuce goes on the very top, away from the dressing. Make three of these at once and keep them in the fridge, and when hunger actually hits, you dump the jar out and eat. It is a genuinely good salad, not a sad desk salad!


For the days you did not prep anything at all, keep a backup plan stocked in your freezer and pantry. Her go-to is frozen soup dumplings heated in broth, with a splash of soy sauce, a little chili crunch and sesame oil, whatever green herbs are in the fridge, and half a can of rinsed chickpeas stirred in. On their own, those dumplings run around 13 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber, not enough to actually hold you. Add the chickpeas and the broth, and that same bowl jumps to roughly 45 grams of protein and 15 grams of fiber, a real meal instead of a snack. The protein and the fiber need to travel together. Protein alone, without enough fiber alongside it, tends to leave you uncomfortable rather than actually fueled.


If forgetting to eat is a real pattern for you, set a phone alarm for early afternoon as a simple check-in. It sounds almost too basic to mention, and it works anyway.


Small changes that remove the mental load

A few of Cassy's smaller habits stuck with me because they solve such a specific, common kind of exhaustion. After school pickup, she keeps one basket in the car that catches everything: backpacks, shoes, water bottles, artwork, library books. Instead of carrying load after load into the house, everything goes into the one basket, and the basket makes exactly one trip inside. The same basket gets reloaded the next morning with whatever needs to leave the house again, so nothing gets lost in the shuffle between the car and the kitchen table.


She also pointed out something simple that is easy to overlook: give your spouse or partner direct access to your shared grocery cart, whether that is HEB, Target, Instacart or something else, so you are not the only person carrying every mental tab about what the household needs. And when she signs up for a meal train to help a friend or neighbor, she often doubles or triples the recipe and freezes the extra for her own family, turning an act of service into a stocked freezer over time.


None of these are complicated, and that is exactly the point. The goal is removing friction wherever you can find it, not adding one more system to manage.


It is okay to want to quit sometimes

One thing Cassy said near the start of our conversation has stayed with me. Building a full life alongside a real business is genuinely hard, and she has wanted to quit more times than she can count. What keeps her going is wanting to model for her daughters that you can build something meaningful and still have a flexible life around it, and that if you ever do need to step away, you can make that decision with your eyes open instead of quitting on a hard day.


If you have felt that same pull this season, tired, stretched thin, wondering if this is sustainable, you are not doing anything wrong. That feeling is part of building something real, not proof that you should not be doing it.


Final thoughts

A business built to last is not just about your pricing and your systems, even though those matter. It is also about whether you are actually eating lunch, celebrating your own wins out loud, and trusting yourself enough to tell your own story instead of handing it to someone else. Pick one thing from this conversation, the prep day, the jar salads, the text-to-celebrate habit, and try it this week. You are allowed to take care of yourself with the same intention you give your bakery.


Cheering you on,

Caroline


Keep going

If this got you thinking about sustaining yourself, not just your bakery, 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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