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Microbakery Month in Review: $3,597, Two Markets, One Lease | Episode 95

  • Aug 7, 2025
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Two bake days. That was the whole month of July in my bakery, on purpose, and it is one of the better business decisions I made all year.


I do a month in review on the first episode of every month because sitting down with the same five questions keeps me from running on vibes. What went well. What did not. What should I change. What did I learn. How will I move forward. If you take nothing else from this post, take that habit, because a month you never looked at is a month you cannot learn from.


Here is July, numbers and all, including the part where I signed a lease on a commercial bakery space.


The context behind the numbers, because comparison will eat you alive

Before I tell you what I made, you need my situation. I treat this as my full time job and I am aiming for a full time income from it, and even in a light summer I am putting in full time hours. I have solid systems, good equipment, and I have taken over our entire front room and dining room, so I have real space. My kids are seven and eight and they play independently.


There are people doing far more revenue than I am. There are people with toddlers hanging on their legs who are choosing to stay small in this season, and that is the right call for them.


So when you read anyone's revenue number, including mine, ask what their setup and their season looks like before you measure yourself against it.


July by the numbers

Two markets, every second and fourth Saturday. Total gross revenue was $3,597. That is top line, before ingredients, overhead, paying myself, packaging and software subscriptions.


When I am only doing two markets, I want at least $2,000 per market, so I came in about $400 short of my own target. Both markets sold me out, which tells me the number was about how much I could bring, not about demand.


The fails were small. I dropped a full tray of brownies on the floor, which was about $32 of lost revenue, and we ate them as a family because dropped brownies still taste good, they just do not slice. I forgot to lower the oven temperature for one round of cookies and baked them at 425, so those were not sellable.


That is a really useful thing to notice, by the way. When your misses are two small mistakes instead of one systemic problem, your systems are doing their job.


The equipment change that actually moved the needle

I picked up a used 20 quart Hobart mixer on Facebook Marketplace, and it changed how a bake day runs. Now I can have bread going in my 30 quart mixer while brownies, cookies, muffins, English muffins or focaccia mix in the 20 quart at the same time. Things that used to wait in line, or that used to take two loads in my Bosch, now happen in one pass.


I bought it knowing I would need the second mixer when I moved into a commercial space, and I bought it used, at a deal I went looking for. That is the version of an equipment upgrade I like: a bottleneck you have already felt, solved with a machine you found at a good price. I have a whole episode on how to decide when it is time.


How I handled the one unhappy customer

A customer told me her loaf came out darker than she liked, close to burnt in her opinion. I bake in a residential oven with real hot spots, so I have to rotate constantly, and my own preference runs dark. I believe her.


Here is what I did, and I want to say up front that I have no strict rule for when someone gets a refund versus a coupon versus a kind word. I go with my gut.

  • I told her the preference was completely valid, and I explained plainly that there is variance when everything comes out of a home oven.

  • I added a note to her customer profile in Simply Bread saying she prefers a lighter bake. Order summaries print with customer notes on them now, so it will not slip past me on a busy bake day.

  • I sent her a $10 coupon for a future pre-order. She did not ask for one and even told me I did not need to do it.

Three or four of my customers now have that lighter bake note on their account. That is a system, and it started with one person being honest with me at a market table. If handling this kind of moment makes your stomach drop, I talk through it in more detail here.


What the menu is telling me

I have been sticking to a much more consistent menu, and the pattern is clear enough now to plan around. I bring four to six inclusion loaves for variety, roughly twice as many sandwich loaves as original, and then English muffins, cookies, muffins and sweets as capacity allows.


The sandwich loaves are the story of the summer. Even bringing double, they sell out at almost exactly the same time as the originals. When one product does that two months in a row, that is your data telling you to bake more of it.


I also tested baking English muffins in rings instead of griddling them. I proofed on a tray, then transferred them onto a second tray I had preheated in the oven with the rings already on it, dusted so they would not stick, and put another preheated tray on top. It was not faster, but it was far less hands on than four minutes a side on the griddle plus eight in the oven. I am still dialing in the temperature and timing.


The lease, and what I would do differently

I have been looking for a commercial space since January. A space I was pursuing fell through in June, which sent me hunting for a plan B, and at the very end of June I finally started working with a commercial real estate broker. I should have done that months earlier.


He put it to me plainly when I said I had been trying to figure it out myself. He said that would be like him trying to bake sourdough for the first time. You could get there eventually, and it will cost you a lot more time than learning from someone who already knows.


We looked at three spaces in one day. One was an easy no, an older building with no air conditioning, which does not fly in South Texas. One was too big a commitment and needed serious build out. The third was workable. Then a few days later he called about another property with two units on it, and one of them checked nearly every box I had.


I spent time reflecting, talked it through with my husband, sought counsel from people I trust, prayed about it, and we put in an offer. After some back and forth with the landlord, I signed the lease, and I am officially in the space.


Now there is a permit application in process that takes four to six weeks, utilities to transfer, insurance and internet to set up, and ovens, refrigeration, prep surfaces, shelving and furniture to source. What I want to do is paint walls and buy cozy chairs. What has to happen first is everything else!


If you are eyeing a commercial space yourself

A few things I did not know to ask, that you should:

  • Whether the space is inside city limits or outside it, because that decides who you are dealing with on permitting and how hard it will be.

  • What an LOI, a letter of intent, actually commits you to before a lease is signed.

  • How long a food establishment permit takes in your county, since four to six weeks sits right in the middle of your opening timeline.

  • What build out the landlord expects you to pay for versus what comes with the space.

On funding, I pursued private money and looked into loans, and those conversations went nowhere. I am self funding a good chunk of the buildout and I decided to crowdfund the rest with my community, which fits a bakery that is meant to be a local food hub. If the traditional route closes on you, that does not mean the project is dead. It means the money is coming from somewhere else.


Final thoughts

The home baker is not going anywhere, and neither is my support for you. I do think we are going to see more small scale sourdough bakeries opening in small towns over the next few years, and I want to be useful to bakers on both sides of that line.


The revenue is the least interesting part of July. We hosted our exchange student from Germany for the whole month, took a night away for our ninth anniversary, ran two solid markets and closed on a space. I finished the month feeling like I gave my time to the right things, and I do not always get to say that.


Whether you are baking two loaves or two hundred, you get to shape this business around your season, your strengths and your story.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you like the behind the scenes months, start with these.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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