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Profitable Holiday Products, Gift Baskets, and Baking Classes | Episode 35

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Time is the one thing in your bakery you cannot make more of. You can buy a bigger mixer, you can raise your prices, you can add a market. You cannot add an hour to Thursday.


So when a baker asks me how to make more money without adding more hours, we are really talking about which products earn the most per minute you spend on them, and how much of that work you can move off your busiest day.


I opened a question box on Instagram and got three that fit together beautifully: profitable products that are quick to make, what actually sells during the holidays, and how to start teaching classes.


Profitable products that do not eat your bake day

The move here is making things once, in a big batch, and having them ready when the orders come.


Start with your freezer. What can you make in bulk now and pull out later? Cookie dough is the obvious one. Scones are mine. Last week I only sold two boxes of scones, which was strange because it is my top flavor, and I still made a batch of six, because six is what my large batch comfortably makes. Now I have dough for four extra boxes sitting in the freezer for the next menu, the next market, or the week I need extra inventory out of nowhere.


If your cottage food law allows it, frozen dough can even be a product of its own. Plenty of customers love the idea of fresh baked cookies and do not trust themselves to make the dough. Here in Texas we cannot sell anything unbaked, so check your own state before you plan around it.


Then look at your dry storage. A big batch of granola or crackers keeps for several weeks in an airtight container, sometimes a month. Those are quick to make, easy to sell, and they are the perfect thing for a customer to add to a bread order, which lifts your average order value without any extra selling. Homemade jam works the same way. When you get a good deal on fruit in season, make a batch, and those jars turn into an upsell all year.


Once you have those pieces, bundle them. A breakfast bundle of granola, a small loaf, and a jar of jam is something you can curate in advance and hand over at your market table in one motion. People buy a bundle far more readily than they buy the same three items separately, partly because it looks like a gift and half of them are already thinking about who they need to bring something to.


For a long time I made my cookies and my scones every single week, in the moment, usually on bake day, because they come together quickly and I kept putting them off. Once I moved that work to the first half of the week, bake day got so much calmer. Nothing about the recipe changed. Only when I did it.


What actually sells during the holidays

There are a lot of people selling sourdough right now and more starting every week, and a lot of them are offering the same things, because trends move fast through the microbakery Facebook groups. Offer the fun trendy items if you want. Just make sure one thing on your holiday menu is yours.


Here are the offers I keep coming back to.

  • Gift baskets. The simple version is a loaf and a jar of jam. The better version brings in local honey, dipping oils, or spice blends from other small businesses near you, so the whole basket is a local experience nobody can order online.

  • Corporate and client gifting. Realtors, insurance agents, and financial advisors need something to send clients in December and most of them have a budget already set aside. They are ready to buy. Your job is to be a better option than the basket they could Google in four minutes, so curate it well, offer to deliver it to their office, and price it at what that market supports.

  • A pre-order only holiday bundle. Put a couple of festive flavors together and make people order ahead. My wintertime loaf is cranberries, pecans, and sage, and people wait for it all year. A flavor that only exists for a few weeks does a lot of work for you.

  • Mix and match minis. Mini loaves, sourdough brownies, gingerbread cookies, spiced crackers, a variety platter of cookies. Tell people how to use them, on a charcuterie board or broken up into several small gifts, because that is what turns a browse into a sale.

  • DIY baking kits. Some of your dehydrated starter with clear beginner instructions, tucked in a basket or a banneton with a wooden spoon and a cotton cloth. An easy gift for the friend who keeps saying they want to try sourdough.

One warning on the mix and match. Limit the options. Give people a few set themes, sweet minis, savory minis, classics, and variety, instead of endless customization. Every extra choice is another thing you have to track, pull, and pack at 5am.


Teacher gifts are the other big one, and they land the week before school lets out. I package a scone flight in a seven inch charcuterie box, four mini scones in four flavors, tied with pretty twine and finished with a dehydrated orange slice and a sprig of rosemary, plus a blank gift tag so the parent just signs it and sends it out the door with their kid.


Price that one for the budget people actually have. In my area $10 is right for a teacher gift, and above $12 you have priced yourself out for the parent with four teachers plus staff to buy for. Check what your own market supports, because this varies a lot by region.


One production note on minis, since they show up all over that list. I shape my scone dough into a square instead of a round, cut it into eighths, then cut those in half. Squares divide down cleanly. Wedges from a round do not.


If you are a year or two in, price the holiday menu first

For the operator with real volume, the trap in this season is adding six new offers and finding out in January that the fussiest one made the least money.


Before you publish the holiday menu, calculate the full cost of ingredients and packaging for each new item and count how many minutes of your hands each one takes. Twine, tags, and a charcuterie box are real costs, and gift items are packaging heavy. Then cap how many new products you launch and keep the ones with the best return for the time they take. A basket that sells well and takes a few minutes to assemble from things you already stock is a completely different product from a small item you have to make from scratch on your busiest morning.


How to start teaching workshops

A lot of bakers worry that teaching classes will cannibalize their sales. Pretty much everyone who has actually taught one will tell you it does the opposite. It builds the local community that buys from you.


What held me back was thinking I did not have the credibility to teach. I had to get over that and fake it until I made it, and then I taught out of my own home. Here is what I would do.

  • Start small and start local. Three to five people in your kitchen. No hauling equipment anywhere.

  • Do a practice run on a friend. This is how you find the gaps in your flow. Mine was casual and fun, and watching her go home and start baking gave me the confidence to teach a real group.

  • Keep the first class basic. A simple, standard sourdough, not a themed shape. You can add an intermediate class later. Sending students home overwhelmed is the fastest way to make sure they never bake again.

  • Reverse engineer the timeline. I wrote out the entire process, then worked out how to compress a 24 hour bake into two or three hours. I start with dough I prepared ahead so students can score and load right away, and the rest of the class fills the time while those loaves bake.

  • Budget time for starter questions, and be ready to close them. Starter is where every class wants to camp out. Kala Hembree makes the same point in her episode. Plan for the questions, then move the class along.

  • Send them home with something. I hand out a short brochure with vocabulary, a simple process, and a way to reach me. I also have an optional private Facebook group. Nobody should walk out feeling left on their own.

To fill the class, start with the customers who have already asked you to teach one and ask them to share it, then post it on your bakery accounts and in your local groups. That combination is the most effective by far.


If you do not want to host at home, the person asking for the class is often your host. I have taught in customers' houses and it works well, and they take care of gathering the group. Community centers, churches, and local restaurants or coffee shops that rent out their space in off hours are all worth a phone call.


Above all, keep it beginner friendly. The last thing I want is for someone to leave my workshop with more questions than they came in with.


Final thoughts

Every idea here comes down to the same habit. Do the work once, in a batch, ahead of the rush, and build offers that carry a good margin for the time they take. That is what makes December feel good instead of frantic.


Pick one thing this week. Bulk a batch of scone or cookie dough into the freezer, or sketch out one gift basket you could sell to a realtor. That is a real start!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you are planning your busy season right now, these three will help you get ahead of it.


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