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How to Start Selling Sourdough Bread: 4 Things to Do First | Episode 85

  • May 29, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Selling your first loaf is not really a baking decision. It is a business decision, and it deserves the same care you would give to opening any other business.


I own an in-home sourdough microbakery, and I have watched so many bakers go straight from "my neighbor just offered me ten dollars for a loaf" to taking pre-orders from strangers, with none of the groundwork underneath it. A few months later the whole thing feels heavy and chaotic and nothing like what they pictured, and they cannot figure out where it went sideways.


Here are the four things to do before you start selling your sourdough bread. If you are already selling and you skipped a couple of these, do not panic. There is no time like the present to go back and shore them up. This list works just as well as an audit as it does a starting point.


1. Understand your cottage food laws before you sell a single loaf

Most of my listeners are in the US, so that is who I am speaking to here. If you are somewhere else, the same idea holds. Find out what the law says about selling food out of a home kitchen where you live.


Every state has its own version of cottage food laws, and those laws decide:

  • whether you can sell from home at all

  • which foods you are allowed to sell

  • where you can sell them, from markets to porch pickup to wholesale to shipping

  • how your products have to be labeled

  • whether you need a permit, a license, or a kitchen inspection

Start with a search for your state plus "cottage food laws," and take a look at Forrager as a starting point. Then search Facebook for your state plus "cottage food" or "cottage bakers." Almost every state has a group, and the bakers in it have already been through the exact permitting question you are about to ask.


Read the rules all the way through, then read them again. If anything is still fuzzy, call your local health department and ask. They would much rather answer your question now than find you later.


Here in Texas, we have very specific labeling requirements and specific limits on what we can sell and how, but we are not required to get any licensing or inspection. Other states are stricter. Some are looser. This is genuinely a fifteen minute research project that protects everything you build on top of it, because the alternative is fines or getting shut down.


And if your state does not allow what you want to sell, you still have options. Adjust your menu to what is allowed, look into renting time in a commercial kitchen, or reach out to other home bakers in your area and find out what is working for them.


2. Get your starter strong, consistent, and not acidic

Think of your starter as your supply chain. Every product you sell depends on it, so it needs to be predictable before anyone is paying you for the result.


If your loaves keep baking up pale no matter how long you leave them in the oven, that is usually an acidic starter. It is incredibly common, my early loaves absolutely had it, and it is very fixable once you know what you are looking at.


I am not your baking teacher, and I say that with love. My lane is the business side. For the craft side, the Sourdough Journey has step by step instructions for rebalancing an acidic starter, and The Perfect Loaf Cookbook by Maurizio Leo is worth reading cover to cover. Both of those are what I used myself, and my starter has been happy ever since.


Before you scale up, get one small batch exactly right. Bake the same recipe over and over until you know how that dough should look and feel at every stage. That consistency is what makes the jump to bulk manageable instead of miserable.


3. Practice bulk baking until you know your real capacity

This is the mistake I see most often. We spend months baking one or two loaves for our family, then take orders for six, and the whole batch surprises us. It ferments faster than we expect, we shape too late or too soon, and we end up with a tray of flat loaves and a very long night.


Do your practice bakes before money is involved. Bake six to twelve loaves, plan to give them away as gifts, and treat it as a real bake day so you can see what breaks.


This matters because a microbakery runs on economy of scale. It does not take much more effort to mix six loaves in a bin than two loaves in a bowl, and that difference is where your profit lives. If you want this business to pay you meaningfully, your process has to produce volume without eating your whole week.


While you practice, write down your real numbers:

  • how many loaves your mixer handles in one batch

  • how many you can cold proof in your fridge at once

  • how many you can bake at a time

  • how long the whole day actually takes, hands on

Those numbers are your capacity, and they are what you use to decide how many pre-orders to open. I know mine cold. When I had a smaller oven I could bake eight loaves at a time, now it is sixteen. My old fridge cold proofed about forty loaves, now it is around eighty. Every equipment upgrade moves the number, so keep tracking it.


If you want to go deeper on this, Episode 45 walks through calculating your capacity for markets and pre-orders, and Episode 55 covers seven things I learned baking sourdough in bulk.


4. Set expectations you can actually live with

You are going to have slow weeks even when you do everything right. Sales ebb and flow, seasons shift, and one quiet week is not a referendum on your business.


Not every loaf will be beautiful. You are going to burn a pan of muffins, like I did, and there will be flour all over your floor. None of that means you are failing. It means you are doing the work, and the flowy-dress version of this job on Instagram is not the real one.


Your capacity will also move around, especially if you have littles at home. Some weeks those kids need you more, and one of the real gifts of a home-based business is that you get to scale back and then pick it up again.


So before you open orders, get clear on three numbers: how many hours a week you can genuinely give this, how much you need to make each month for it to be worth it, and what you will charge to get there. Episode 87 covers the business basics behind those numbers, and Episode 98 walks through how to pay yourself $1,000 a month from your microbakery.


Already selling? Use this as an audit instead

If you are a year or two in, run yourself through the same four checks. It is usually one of them quietly causing the mess.

  • Are you fully compliant with your state's current rules, including labeling?

  • Is your starter consistent enough that bake day never surprises you?

  • Do you know your true capacity by the number, or are you guessing every week?

  • Do you know what you need to earn each month, and are your prices set to get you there?

When bake days feel harder than they should, the cause is usually a bottleneck rather than effort. Episode 123 is all about finding those, and Episode 125 is about the shift from hobby baker to business owner.


Final thoughts

A little of this might feel like tough love. I mean it as the opposite. When your foundation is solid, growing is so much easier, and you get to keep doing this for years instead of burning out by spring.


Understand your laws. Strengthen your starter. Practice your bulk bake. Set expectations you can live with. Then start selling with real confidence, because you will know exactly what you are building on.


If you have not started yet, you are on the path to such a strong foundation and I am proud of you. If you are already selling and just realized you skipped a step, today is a great day to fix it.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


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