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Real Advice From Bakers on Pricing, Wholesale and Growth | Episode 75

  • Apr 7, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Some of the best business advice I have ever gotten came from other bakers, in the middle of a conversation, when neither of us was trying to teach anything.


I sat down with a whole group of them for a two day virtual summit for sourdough microbakery owners, and the same handful of ideas kept surfacing in every single conversation: pricing, competition, wholesale, and knowing when to stop adding things to your menu.


So this is the short version, the pieces that made me sit up in my chair. Seven lessons from bakers who are actually running these businesses, and what to do with each one this week.


You are already your own customer

When I asked Megan about the mindset around pricing, she pointed at the thing bakers say all the time: "I would not pay that much for a loaf of bread."


Her answer stopped me. You already are paying that much. You bought the equipment. You spent months learning the skill. You eat your own product every week. You have invested more into that loaf than any customer of yours ever will.


Pricing brings up real feelings, and most of them are fear. Fear of overcharging, worry about what people will or will not pay, sometimes plain guilt. Those feelings are normal and they are also terrible at math.


Here is what to do with it. Calculate the cost of your ingredients and packaging per loaf, add a real hourly rate for your time, and set your price above that number with room to breathe. Then leave it alone and let your customers decide. They almost always surprise you.


There is room for you, even with three other bakers in town

When bakers see competition nearby, the assumption underneath is that the market is only so big and someone else already took the good part of it. That is almost never true.


One of the bakers I talked to said it plainly. We all have something different to offer, and we all connect with customers differently. She might not reach a customer the way you would, and that is completely fine, because the right people find you.


So reach out. Send the message to the baker fifteen minutes away, tell them you are not trying to take anything from them, and see if they want to know each other. Trust gets built one small genuine gesture at a time, and it usually ends in referrals going both directions.


Walk into a barter like you are offering something good

Angela said the mindset for bartering is confidence, and she meant something specific by it. You have to believe your product is good before you offer it to anyone.


You cannot do it half-heartedly. Saying "well, if you want some of my bread, most people seem to like it" is an apology dressed up as an offer, and the person hearing it will treat it that way.


Her version sounds like this: I make incredible bread, I think you are going to love it, a lot of people already buy from me, and I think a trade would be great for both of us. Say it out loud a few times before you send the email. The words you use about your own product train the person across from you in how to treat it.


Pick your wholesale accounts on purpose

Delaney is picky about wholesale clients, and after hearing why, I think you should be too. She looks at three things before she says yes.

  • Ingredients and values. Does what they put on the shelf match what you put in your bread?

  • Communication. She tried to work with a coffee shop that took five or six days to answer a text. Sourdough does not work that way, because it is not a last minute order. If they cannot answer in a day, they cannot be a wholesale partner.

  • Location. How far is the delivery drive? Margins on bread are already thin, so a long commute can eat the entire profit on an account.

Before you say yes to your next wholesale inquiry, run those three questions. A wholesale account that pays slowly, orders late, and sits forty minutes away will cost you more than it brings in.


Where your grain comes from is part of your marketing

Alexandria talked about heritage grains, and the business piece of it is the story. You can tell a customer that you baked this loaf, or you can tell them where the wheat was grown and who grew it. One of those is a much better story, and there is a real group of customers who buy specifically because of it.


Sarah put the wider version of this beautifully. Her kids would never have known that bread can be made from scratch if she did not make it from scratch. When food becomes a commodity, the thing we lose is the connection to it.


That connection is what sets your bread apart from the shelf at the grocery store. Somebody made this with their hands, for you, on purpose. Put that in your captions, on your labels, and on your market signs. It is the truest thing about what you do, and it happens to sell bread.


If you are six to twelve months in, simplify to grow

This is the one I would tape to the wall. James said that when a baker has six to twelve months behind them, the move is almost always to simplify.


By that point you have tried a bunch of products and a bunch of ways to sell them, and you have some idea of who you are as a brand. The businesses that do really well from there tend to do one thing, or a very few things, extremely well.


He used Crumbl Cookies as the example. One product, about fifty variations, instead of twelve different products with three variations each. Your version might be sourdough loaves, or it might be scones. What matters is that you pick.


A little product mix still helps, especially when the items are tiered so a customer buying a loaf can easily add cinnamon rolls to the order. What you want to avoid is being all things to all people, because that is where the wall comes from around the one year mark. The bakers who hit that wall are working extremely hard. They are simply carrying too many products at once.


Here is the audit. List every item you sell, put your weekly unit sales next to each one, and calculate the cost of your ingredients per item so you can see the margin. Anything with low volume and a thin margin comes off the menu for a season. You will feel the difference in your bake day within two weeks.


How one baker uses AI to plan his growth

One of the bakers, Josh, has scaled from happily making ten loaves a week to around 130 or 140 a week, and a lot of his planning happens in conversation with ChatGPT.


The way he uses it is worth copying. He gives it a role before he asks a question, so it is answering as a brand strategist or an accountant instead of in general. He has had hundreds of conversations with it over months, on brand identity and naming, product strategy and menu planning, weekly production and workflow, pricing and financial forecasting, operational scaling, market booth strategy, marketing, and his website.


Then he asks it to group all of that into topics and summarize the decisions he has already made, what is still open, and what he should work on next. That last part is the trick. He uses it to organize his own thinking so he can see his business from above, and he still makes every call himself.


Final thoughts

Not one of these came from a business book. They came from bakers who are up before dawn, running deliveries between school pickups, and figuring it out in real time.


Pick one. Reprice a single item, send one message to a local baker, or take one slow product off your menu this month. That is enough to start.


You are not doing this alone, and you do not have to figure it out by yourself!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you want more of these conversations, start here.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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