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How to Run a Microbakery in 80 Square Feet | Episode 66

  • Mar 6, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Angela De Krieger runs her sourdough microbakery out of 80 square feet. I am not rounding that number for effect. She measured her old dining room before we recorded, and 80 square feet is what it came to, inside an 1100 square foot house she shares with her husband and four kids in southern Indiana.


Out of that room she is averaging around 50 loaves a week through a porch pickup and one downtown drop-off location, in a town of 3,000 people, and one recent week she also put out more than 200 cookies. She runs a small batch fermentation business and teaches workshops on top of it.


I asked her how, because "I do not have the space yet" is one of the most common reasons bakers tell me they have not started or have not grown. Here is what she does, and what I want you to take from it.


Build the space you have into a working production room

Angela's setup is one wall. A 22 cubic foot refrigerator, a dough table with a single shelf underneath, and a 30 quart mixer. That is the whole bakery, and everything else is stored around it.

  • Go vertical. Two shelves up high hold every banneton, bread pan and extra pan she owns, out of the way of the work surface.

  • Buy folding, not fixed. She uses an origami folding shelf that collapses to two or three inches and slides down beside the refrigerator, plus collapsible three tier cooling racks. Each one comes out on bake day and goes away after.

  • Use the sides of things. Magnetic bins on the side of the refrigerator hold her dough supplies, kept completely separate from the family kitchen.

  • Get scrappy with containers. Her flour bins are rolling dog food bins. They cost a fraction of what proper flour bins cost, and they roll out of the way when she needs the refrigerator door.

  • Move the furniture. On heavy bake days the kids eat lunch on a blanket on the floor so she can use the counter, and everyone survives it.

One more thing that matters more than it sounds. Angela is an occupational therapist and she asked me point blank why so many bakers keep a 30 quart mixer on the floor. Get it up on a table next to your dough bins. Your back is a piece of equipment too, and it is the one you cannot replace.


If you want more ideas along these lines, I put a whole episode together on this in Small Space, Big Dreams: Creative Small Space Hacks for Your Home Bakery | Episode 18.


Let the space set your menu, on purpose

Here is the part I loved. Angela knows exactly what her room can produce and she has built her menu to match it, rather than fighting it every week.


She is not running five breads and three desserts. She keeps the lineup simple, because with a three year old at home and a limited counter, adding flavors is the thing that would tip her into burnout. She made that call on purpose, and it is a smart business decision.


Do this deliberately. Look at your actual counter space, your oven capacity and the hours you have, and then decide what your menu can be. A short menu produced well in a small room will beat a long menu produced badly in a big one every single time. When something starts slipping, take it off your menu for a while. I walk through how to do that without upsetting your customers in When to Remove a Product from Your Microbakery Menu (and How to Do It Gracefully) | Episode 60.


Put a date on the sacrifice

Angela gave up her dining table setup and sold the piano to make room for the bakery. She cried the day the piano went out the door. She does not have a couch for her family of six.


What makes that work is that it is not forever. She has a three year plan to build a commercial kitchen on their property, and she has written the goal down. The sacrifice has an end date and a picture attached to it, right down to the new piano that goes back in that spot when she moves out of the house.


If you are giving something up for your bakery right now, give it a timeline. An open-ended sacrifice with no finish line is how bakers end up resentful of a business they love. A sacrifice with a date on it is a plan.


Multiple revenue streams, and the one signal that you have too many

Angela's income comes from the microbakery, the fermentation business, hands-on workshops, and her writing. They grew one at a time, out of skills she already had.


The workshops are worth a close look if your sales are seasonal. She runs them in the winter when the farmers market is closed, so her slow months earn. She teaches at a local shop that takes 10 percent of workshop revenue, after she priced other venues that wanted $150 an hour. Her bread pickup host takes nothing at all, because the pickup brings people through the door.


Her test for whether she has taken on too much is the best one I have heard, and it is simple. If the quality of your product starts to slip, you are spread too thin. Customers forgive a missing menu item. A bad loaf is much harder to come back from.


The networking that actually grows a local bakery

Angela cold called restaurant owners for advice. She invited a local organic farmer she had never met over for dinner, and that turned into him growing Napa cabbage for her ferments and inviting her bread into his CSA. She drops bread off at the jewelry shop and the antique store downtown, with no collaboration in mind, just so people know her face. One of those shop owners shared her workshop to a Facebook page with 10,000 followers and she picked up around 60 new followers in a day.


None of that costs money. It is showing up in your own town, being genuinely glad about other people's businesses, and letting that come back to you on its own schedule.


If you are a year or two in

Two moves from this conversation are worth your time this month.


First, take the mental load out of your head and onto paper. Angela writes her entire week out, down to "take the butter out to soften," and sets a Google Calendar alarm at 4 PM to start her levains for the next morning's bake. She still needs it after a year. So do I, and so will you.


Second, look at where your growth actually stops. If you have real demand and your room is genuinely full, that is when a helper makes more sense than another shelf. Angela brought on a bakery assistant this year and it changed what her weeks can hold. I walk through when and how to do that in Hiring an Assistant for a Burnout Proof Bakery | Episode 111.


Final thoughts

The thing Angela said that I keep coming back to is this. Fear is not a reason to not move forward, and planning is not doing. You can research a microbakery for a year and feel busy the whole time without ever selling a loaf.


Your kitchen is probably bigger than 80 square feet. Whatever it is, it is enough to start with, and the sacrifices you make for it should have a date on them.


Go find Angela at Singing Trees Keep and tell her I sent you!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this conversation was your kind of thing, these three will keep you going.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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