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What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Selling Sourdough Bread | Episode 136

  • 12 minutes ago
  • 10 min read

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If you are standing in your kitchen right now with more loaves than freezer space and a growing suspicion that you might accidentally be starting a business, I would love to hand you my year one notes.


The Bread Winner Podcast turned two this month, so I went back through the downloads to find the episodes bakers listen to all the way through, and my look back at my first year in business was right at the top. I am bringing it back this week. If you want the fuller version with all of the reports and revenue broken down month by month, that is How I Grew a Microbakery to $45,000 in Year One, and it pairs with everything below.


Here is the part that has changed since I recorded it. I am wrapping up year three now. I bake out of a brick and mortar bakery, I have a bread oven and a commercial fridge, and I have been out of my house for over six months. Every single piece of that came out of the foundation I built in year one, when I learned a lot, did plenty of things wrong, and had growing pains I would not wish on anybody.


So this is what I wish somebody had sat me down and told me before I sold my first loaf.


Set up a real ordering system before you take your first order

I started selling in September of 2023, and for the first five months I ran everything by hand. A spreadsheet, a simple order form, payments coming in through cash and Venmo, and orders arriving in my messages from six directions at once. It worked, in the sense that bread got baked and money came in. It also meant that when I sat down a year later to pull my real numbers, the first few months were not well accounted for and I could not tell you exactly what I had earned.


If you have not started selling yet, or you are only a few weeks in, start with an ordering app on day one. Simply Bread is what I use and love, and Hotplate is great too. It genuinely does not matter which one you pick. What matters is that your customers learn from their very first order that this is where they find you, so you are not retraining everybody a year from now when you finally get organized. You are also building your customer list from order number one instead of trying to reconstruct it later.


I switched over in February of 2024, and my only regret is that I did not do it in September.


Price on purpose, starting with your very first loaf

In the beginning I priced by looking around. What was the baker across town charging, what did I see in the local Facebook groups, what felt like a number people would say yes to. Then I guessed. There are products from that first year that I now know I was badly undercharging for, and I carried those prices for months without realizing what they were costing me.


Pricing on purpose means starting with your own numbers instead of somebody else's menu. Calculate the cost of your ingredients down to the gram, add packaging, add your overhead, and then add enough margin on top to actually pay you for the hours you are standing at that counter. Then work backward from what you need the business to bring in each week, and figure out how many products you have to produce to get there.


It is arithmetic, and nobody teaches it to you when you fall into this business sideways. I eventually built my own Profit & Pricing Calculator so I would stop guessing, and it will do the math for you if you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself. The method matters more than the tool, so please do it one way or the other before you set another price.


Keep the menu small, and make sure everything on it batches

When I pulled my year one reports, the thing that surprised me most was how concentrated my revenue was. My original sourdough loaf sold over 820 units all by itself. Sandwich bread was close to 300. After that came cookies, jalapeno cheddar bread that I personally do not care for at all and keep making because my customers adore it, and English muffins. The vast majority of my revenue came from fewer than ten core products.


Having one hero product does more than pay the bills. It gives your business an identity, so people know exactly what you are known for and exactly what they are coming back for.


The other half of this is whether an item batches well. Anything you can mix, portion and freeze in bulk protects you from burnout, because you are producing more with less effort. Anything that has to be handled as a one-off either needs a premium price or needs to come off your menu. My example is deli rye. I love a good rye, but I never got more than four to six orders for it, which meant it could not go in the mixer with everything else and had to be mixed by hand. So I procrastinated it every week, and it turned into a stressful scramble on bake day. That was a red flag. I took it off my menu entirely, and in all this time not one single person has asked me where it went!


Upgrade your equipment in small steps and let the business pay for it

You cannot go from a home oven to a bread oven in one leap, and you do not need to. What you can do is reinvest your earnings in small, deliberate upgrades that each buy back time.


Here is exactly what mine looked like in year one.

  • By my third week selling, I bought a baking steel and taught myself to open bake in my home oven, which took me from shuffling Dutch ovens with three loaves at a time to four loaves at a time. I also picked up a couple of large plastic bins from a restaurant supply store so I could mix by hand without six bowls all over the counter, a bench scraper, and a few Cambro tubs so my starters could graduate from mason jars.

  • In February of 2024, I had an outlet wired in the room next to my kitchen for a double oven, added a 30 quart mixer, and bought a used freezer off Facebook Marketplace that I ran as a fridge with an Inkbird temperature controller. I went from four loaves at a time to eight, and my sleep improved dramatically.

  • In June of 2024, still inside year one, I replaced that $250 secondhand double oven with a new and far more efficient one that let me bake with two steels per oven. Eight loaves at a time became sixteen.

This business runs on an economy of scale, which simply means you make money by producing more with less effort. Every one of those upgrades protected my energy as much as my time, and none of them happened all at once.


Show up consistently in one local place

Almost all of my early visibility came from a single local Facebook group, the Bulverde Spring Branch Social Network. Not a paid ad, not a viral reel. I did not even have an Instagram account until around month three, and I barely used it for a while after that.


My very first post there was conversational on purpose. I said I had been baking a lot, I was out of freezer space, and I did not know what to do with the extra loaves, and I asked what people thought I should do. I did not say I was selling anything. Over 50 people messaged me asking how they could buy bread. Every comment pushed that post back up in the feed, so who knows how many more people saw it and never said a word.


Then I kept showing up. Thank you for the excitement, I baked six loaves this week instead of two, here is the link. On Saturdays we shop local, I will be at the market from nine to two along with these other vendors. Never salesy, always about being a neighbor and lifting up local business. People started coming up to my table saying they were there because they had seen me on Facebook, and they still say it, long after I stopped posting in that group as often.


Consistency in one place your people already gather beats a scattered presence in five places. That is the whole marketing strategy from year one.


Find out what your state lets you earn before you build your plan

I brought in right around $45,000 in year one, from September 2023 to September 2024. In Texas, cottage food sales are capped at $50,000 a year, which means that even if I had the capacity to produce more, I was limited by the law long before I was limited by my oven.


Look this up for your own state before you plan anything, because it changes what a realistic year looks like for you. It also changes what you do next, since income that falls outside cottage sales usually does not count toward that limit. About $3,500 of my year one revenue came from workshops I taught in April, May and June to small groups of three to five people, plus a couple of larger classes, and that money was not restricted the way my bread sales were.


Plan for the slow seasons before they arrive

My biggest month in year one was April of 2024, and it was not luck. It was strong market days stacked with workshops around Easter, and my largest single sales day that year was $1,394 at a market that month.


Sales peaks are more predictable than they feel. Holidays, weather and school calendars move our customers in ways you can plan around if you look ahead a few months instead of a few weeks. Those spring workshops are what carried me toward profitability and let me buy the better double oven, and they bridged the gap into summer, which is a slower stretch for most of us.


Holidays work the same way. In December of 2023 I did not attempt a big holiday bake. I offered one thing, small teacher appreciation gift boxes that I could prep ahead, bake from frozen and wrap up cute, and they brought in over $900. Selling them before the holiday rush and before the kids got out of school let me take the rest of December off and actually enjoy it.


Say yes to fewer things, and write down how you do them

I said yes to too much in year one. Back to back markets, one-off custom orders, opportunities I took because they were there. It left me spread thin and tired, and it did not make my business stronger. I do not do back to back markets anymore, and I do not take custom orders, because I have nothing left to prove to anybody.


The companion to that is documenting your processes, even while you are still doing every job yourself. Write down how you package each product, how your labels get made, how you pre-measure ingredients. All the repeated things. I waited far too long to bring on help, and when I was finally ready, the onboarding was harder than it needed to be because everything lived in my head. Even hiring somebody to wash dishes a couple of hours a week is easier when you can hand them a page instead of a lecture.


Already selling? Use year one as an audit instead

If you are a year or two in, run this as a review rather than a to-do list.

  • Rank every product by profit per hour of your labor, not by revenue, and look hard at the bottom two.

  • Check which items on your menu do not batch. Those are the ones you procrastinate on bake day, and that feeling is data.

  • Recalculate the cost of your ingredients across the whole menu. Flour and butter have moved, and prices you set two years ago are not paying you today's wages.

  • Count how close you are to your state's cottage limit, and decide now what your next move is if you are approaching it.

  • Open your systems folder. If you do not have one, that is this week's project.

Growth at this stage almost never comes from adding another product. It comes from making what you already sell more profitable and easier to produce.


Final thoughts

Your first year is really about learning what works for you, in your kitchen, with your capacity and your customers. Not everything I did will fit your life, and it is not supposed to.


The thing I most want you to take from year one is that a solid product, a repeatable rhythm and the willingness to keep showing up will carry you further than a perfect plan. Almost everybody gets a burst of momentum in the first few weeks, and almost everybody hits the slump when the novelty wears off and there is a week with one order or none. I had those weeks. Pushing through them is what built the regular customers I still have today.


And there is no point of arrival. I am three years in with a bread oven and a bakery outside my house, and there are still growing pains and lessons to learn. Everything just changes shape. That is a good thing, because it means the foundation you are laying right now in your home kitchen is the thing that makes everything after it possible!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this one landed, here is where to go next.


Links to things you might like!


Sourdough microbakery owner looking back at lessons from her first year selling bread
 
 
 

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