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When to Take a Product Off Your Microbakery Menu | Episode 60

  • Feb 13, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


The product that taught me this lesson was rye.


I love the idea of offering hearty grains and brown breads, and I still want to move that direction. But when I first got started, rye sat on my menu and pulled in one order, maybe two, on a bake day. So there I was mixing a single loaf by itself, in the middle of a morning where every other batch was twelve or twenty loaves at a time.


Mixing one extra batch is not much work on paper. Mixing a one-off batch inside an efficient bake day is a different thing, and I started to dread it. I would put it off, then run out of time and rush it, and I was not proud of what came out of the oven. I was also stocking rye flour and caraway seeds that went into nothing else on my menu.


If your business is here to stay, not every product belongs on your menu forever. Let me show you how to tell when something has to go, how to do it without the guilt, and exactly what to say to your customers.


Three signs a product needs to come off your menu

It is inefficient or it wrecks your workflow. Does this one item create a bottleneck? Does it make your bake day feel twice as long? Are you mixing tiny one-off batches while everything else runs at scale? Your time is precious enough that a single item throwing off a whole morning is worth reconsidering, even when the item itself is quick to make.


It does not sell, or it forces you to carry ingredients you use nowhere else. A specialty flour, a seed, a spice, an extract that lives on your shelf for one product that gets ordered once a month. That is money sitting still and shelf space you could use. Slow sales do not mean the product is bad. It usually means your market is not asking for it right now.


You dread making it. This is the sign I would pay the closest attention to. If you see it on the order list and wish nobody had ordered it this week, or you feel the frustration bubble up, that is your answer. Your menu should be full of the things you actually enjoy making, because when you love the process your customers can taste it. When you are procrastinating and feeling icky about it, you are much more likely to hand over something you are not fully proud of.


How to let it go without the guilt

Removing a product feels uncomfortable, especially when you have a few diehard customers who love it. There is real money involved too, and a weekly order disappearing off the books is a genuine thing to weigh.


Here is what I keep coming back to. Your business is yours. If a product is making your life harder, you are allowed to let it go. You are building something that is meant to be burnout proof, and that only works if you make the rules in favor of your own sanity and your own joy.


A few things that make the decision easier:

  • Reframe it. You are not taking something away. You are making space for what actually works. Write that on a sticky note if you need to, because it is the whole ballgame. A simpler menu is what lets you run a profitable week without feeling wrung out by Sunday.

  • Set a batch minimum. If you truly have a handful of superfans, keep the product as a special order with a floor. "I will make this when at least six people pre-order it." That way your time is covered, and if the demand is real your customers will rally and make it happen.

  • Offer an alternative. If someone asks about the discontinued item, point them to something close. If they loved your whole wheat, send them to your spelt loaf. In my experience most people never even ask, but having the answer ready makes the conversation easy.

  • Make it seasonal instead of permanent. If it is tied to ingredient availability or it is a true specialty, bring it back occasionally rather than carrying it every week. "It will be back in October" is a complete and happy answer.

Letting go of a product is not saying no to it forever. It might come back when you have more bandwidth or when demand shifts. This is an intentional choice for the season you are in.


What to actually say to customers

Keep it short, clear and warm. Do not apologize and do not over explain.


Most of the time I do not make a public announcement at all. I simply stop offering the product, and when someone asks I answer them graciously: I do not have the bandwidth for that one right now, and my market is not supporting it, so I am focusing on my most popular bakes.


If you do want to say something, here is wording you can copy and adjust:


"After a lot of thought, I have decided to simplify my menu so I can focus on my most popular and most efficient bakes. That means I will no longer be offering my rye bread. I know some of you loved it and I so appreciate your support. If you are looking for something similar, I would recommend my 50/50 whole wheat heritage loaf."


Notice what is not in there. No confession that you dread making it. No explanation about stocking one ingredient for one item. None of the baker stuff your customer does not need to carry. You are thanking them, you are offering them somewhere to go, and you are moving on.


Customers are almost always gracious about this! Many of them will praise you for building your business in a way that works for you, because they want you to be happy and they want you to stay in business. If someone is genuinely bummed, you can go one step further and send them to another baker in town who makes it well. Those referrals come back around, and having a baker friend you trade customers with is worth more than one loaf a week ever was.


If you are one to three years in

At this stage you probably have twenty or thirty items that accumulated one at a time, and nobody ever sat down and decided the menu should look like this.


Do an honest menu audit. Pull your last several bake days and put every product in one of three buckets: sells well and runs smoothly, sells well but fights your workflow, or barely sells at all. That last bucket usually comes off the menu this month, no ceremony.


The middle bucket is where the real money is. Those are products your market wants and your process cannot handle yet, so the fix is a process change instead of a cut. Maybe it moves to a different day, or gets batched larger and frozen, or gets a batch minimum attached. Calculate the cost of your ingredients on each of these before you decide, because a slow-moving item with a strong margin is a different conversation than a slow-moving item with a thin one.


Then put this on a schedule and look at the whole menu twice a year. A menu that never gets edited is how you end up with a bake day nobody designed.


Final thoughts

Take an honest look at your menu this week and find the one thing that drains you. It is probably the item you procrastinate, or the one that clogs your morning, or the one you keep only because you feel bad about disappointing three people.


Give yourself permission to let it go. Your business gets simpler, your bake days get shorter, and the products you keep get better, because they are the ones you actually want to make.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you are rethinking your menu, these three will help you build it back stronger.


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