Opening a pastry shop on your own is an easy way to turn a hobby into a business.

Specifics of home confectionery business

A home-based confectionery business is especially attractive as a business idea for those who do not have sufficient funds and skills to implement a full-fledged enterprise, and are more often considered as a part-time job. But, with a competent approach and an established client base, the idea may well meet the financial needs of the family.

When starting your own business, you should understand its strengths and weaknesses and be prepared for it.

Advantages of a home-based confectionery business

• Minimum investment;
• Fast return on costs;
• Potentially high margins.

Difficulties of creating a home bakery

• Difficulties in finding a permanent market;
• Seasonality (rush during the New Year holidays and relative calm in the summer);
• Lack of strategic planning opportunities at the initial stage;
• Financial ceiling.

Types of baked goods

First of all, a novice businessman needs to decide what kind of baked goods to prepare. The main target audience, methods of searching for potential clients and other nuances will depend on the chosen option. Common options for home baking as a business are:

• Making pies and other baked goods. Such products can be sold through small offices and retail outlets.
• Cakes and pastries to order. It is worth noting that in this case, single and irregular orders for various celebrations predominate.
• Other products for culinary and catering establishments. This direction is suitable for those who have the opportunity to produce products in large volumes.

Please note that selling products without official registration is only permissible if cakes are produced at home. But with a significant increase in business profits, the lack of official registration can be considered as tax evasion. In other cases, selling baked goods without registration is practically impossible and extremely dangerous from a legal point of view. In this regard, this step should be included in the business plan.

Registration

It is very difficult to register a home confectionery business with Rospotrebnadzor and obtain permits, even if you have equipped your own kitchen with everything you need. The fact is that sanitary and epidemiological standards were developed for industrial premises and facilities, which is impossible in a city apartment, ranging from the size of the kitchen, special equipment to the complete isolation of products and raw materials from products for personal use.

My recipe

To prepare you will need:

• almond flour (very finely ground, the finest you can find);
• powdered sugar;
• egg white;
• water;
• sugar.

Further:

• food thermometer;
• precision kitchen scales;
• mixer (preferably planetary);
• silicone spatula;
• pastry nozzle Circle 8-10 mm;
• pastry bag;
• Teflon/silicone mats.

Preparing 30-35 cakes:

For the test:

1. Almond flour – 150 g
2. Powdered sugar – 150 gr
3. Egg white – 55 g

Cooking process.

First, pour the flour into a bowl and mix well with a whisk so that there are no lumps. Add powder to flour and mix until smooth. Add protein and mix everything. You should get a dense mass.

For the meringue:

1. Egg white – 150 gr.
2. Powdered sugar – 150 gr.
3. Water – 37 gr.
4. Sugar – 150 gr.

Cooking process.

I’ll say right away that this is the most difficult and important thing, if you do something wrong, you can throw away all the dough (macaronage).

Take a saucepan (a saucepan with 1 long handle), add sugar and water there. Place on the stove and heat to a temperature of 116-118 degrees, the classic value is 118 degrees.

While the sugar and water are heating at the lowest speed, beat the egg whites with a mixer.

When the temperature reaches 112 degrees, turn on the mixer at a speed slightly higher than average (beat into foam, it should NOT be dense like a lump).

We don’t turn off the mixer and start pouring in our syrup at 118 degrees. The foam will increase in volume and beat until our meringue is dense and homogeneous. If you turn over the container in which you whipped it, the meringue should not leak out and fall (below the photo how it should be).

Then mix the meringue and dough. Gently smooth movements. Just a little bit of stirring.

Divide 1-2 parts and add dye. Mix until the dough rolls off the spatula into a tight tablecloth (as in the photo above).

We take the nozzle, throw it into a pastry bag and pour out our dough. I recommend making a stencil like this for laying out. The size of the cakes should be 4-4.5 cm.

Stencil for making cakes

Place a Teflon mat on the stencil and spread the mixture into circles. Then place the mat in a baking tray. Beat the baking sheet on the table to release any excess bubbles from the dough.

Leave to dry for 30-60 minutes, it all depends on humidity, etc. With a humidity of 100%, they may not dry at all and everything goes into the trash.

Baking. This is very difficult, everyone’s oven is different and you need to choose one for yourself.

Most homes have conventional home ranges and ovens. You can bake 1 mat in them. Not more. If you have 16 rugs, congratulations, you are stuck for 12 hours and you won’t be able to sleep - you go straight to work. This is about painful things.

Set the “top-bottom” mode, 160-150 degrees, in which slot to insert the baking sheet you need to decide for yourself through trial and error, first the middle.

Bake for 10-20 minutes, it all depends on the oven, temperature, etc.

Sit in front of the glass and watch the “pasta” begin to rise. Readiness is checked this way: open the oven and carefully shake the hat; it should not wobble separately from the skirt.

Properly baked macarons should come off the mat easily after cooling.

When the lower part of the cake (skirt) seems to have blurred and has a larger diameter than the upper part (cap) - this is not the correct skirt, and the wrong “pasta”, the dough was broken or the temperature was too high. Ideally, the skirt should be the size of a Macaron in diameter. Perfectly smooth. This is the look you should strive for:

There are many videos on the Internet of making these sweets. Explore.

A step-by-step plan for the development of a home confectionery business

It’s worth starting a confectionery business at home from scratch only after the concept has been developed and the details have been thought out. The optimal algorithm consists of the following practical steps:

1. Prepare a catalogue. It must be in electronic and paper form. Create work pages on all social networks and post photos. Photos of prepared dishes are the key to success in an online advertising campaign.
2. Develop a memorable logo and make business cards to give to all your friends.

   

3. Register an individual entrepreneur.
4. Start a massive advertising campaign on city social networks with links to your profile. Come up with promotions and bonuses that will help you gain your first customers.
5. Make a commercial offer to neighboring retail kiosks , sweet shops and office centers by offering them a trial batch of products.
6. Track sources of orders and strengthen these areas . If you receive most of your orders from VK, improve and invest the main efforts in its development.

Other sources of income

Do you know a joke? A man was asked what he would do if he became king. And he replied: “I would still sew a little.” So I was always looking for some additional sources of income.

Special offers

Before the holidays, I made special offers, for example, that you could take a master class at my home: learn how to make a beautiful cake, decorate cupcakes, make sugar flowers. Sometimes a girl wanted to make a cake for a guy with her own hands, and I just helped her. It cost the same as a regular cake, but I liked it because it’s more fun together.

Sales

Once I needed to quickly collect a certain amount of money. I held a sale: that is, for several days you could order a cake for less than 1,100 rubles. per kg, and 900 per kg. I collected 15 thousand rubles. prepayment I repeated this from time to time.

Infobusiness

Then I became interested in training. And I tried to make and sell a course on how to make money on custom cakes. True, only one person managed to sell my custom marathon. But I earned 7,700 rubles. And then, as a sign of gratitude, I recommended this pastry chef to everyone who asked. By the way, the student liked the course, and she still successfully bakes cakes to order.

How much can you earn selling baked goods?

When planning an assortment of baked goods, you should take into account the time of day: sweet pastries sell best in the morning, meat pies in the afternoon, and pies with potatoes, eggs and cabbage in the evening. In rainy and hot weather, baked goods sales decline. Therefore, in order to avoid damage to unsold baked goods, goods are delivered to the retail outlet in smaller quantities.

The assortment of baked goods includes 10-15 items. In favorable weather, in a good location, at least 300 pies are sold per day, on holidays - more than 600-700 pies. One cart can handle an average of 200 units, and is loaded two to three times during the day. The markup on the product must be at least 50%, otherwise the business will not be so profitable.

Gross income from one well-located retail outlet can reach up to 100 thousand rubles per month or more. The following should be deducted from income:

• Salary of 2 salespeople – 30 thousand rubles,
• Insurance contributions to the Pension Fund (30% of salary) – 10 thousand rubles,
• Rent – ​​5 thousand rubles,
• Electricity – 2 thousand rubles,
• Taxes (UTII) – 2 thousand rubles,
• Fuel and lubricants – 8 thousand rubles,
• Other expenses – 5 thousand rubles.

The total profit from one outlet is on average 38 thousand rubles.

Setting up a business selling fresh baked goods seems quite affordable. Low investments in business, simple registration of activities, a wide choice of locations for retail outlets - all this creates the illusion of easy money. However, here, as in any other business, there are difficulties that you cannot immediately see - control over the honesty of sellers, timely delivery of goods, safety of equipment from vandals, increased rental rates, pressure from competitors, and so on and so forth. Add to this the pronounced seasonality of the baked goods trade. Enthusiasm alone is probably not enough here...

Where to begin?

Before you start, you need to develop a business plan. Its main functions include the following sections:

• Indication of main directions.
• Description of specific advantages, what marketing moves are planned to be taken to promote your business.
• Formulation of development strategy for both short-term and long-term periods.
• Calculation of financial needs taking into account possible risks and unforeseen expenses.
• Characteristics of the components for starting a new business, personnel, equipment, premises, etc.
• Identifies the persons responsible for the startup process step by step.
• Shows the amount of time required to promote a new project.

A clear plan, thought out in detail, creates the main prerequisites for the success of a new business. Its specific content, which details the strategy of action on how to open your own business, depends on what form of business organization you choose.

How to open your own pastry shop?

If you are going to organize the sale of delicacies of your own production, then the main thing will be choosing the location of the confectionery shop and studying the sales market. The design of the premises and competent, professional staff, friendly and attentive, are of great importance.

The use of different advertising methods using discounts should also be included in the planning. How successful the organization of your own business will be depends on a well-thought-out strategy of action.

Formats for organizing work with sweet products

The attractiveness of the delicacy business lies in its profitability, reaching 30%, and the relatively low price of entering the market for products that are in constant, stable high demand. Moreover, the formats of this kind of establishment are varied, starting with a small cafeteria and ending with an online store selling cakes. It can be:

1. Confectionary shop.
2. Confectionery bakery.
3. Factory.
4. Mini pastry shop.
5. Homemade confectionery.

Each of them has its own characteristics. For example, to open a workshop and cafe selling sweets, you need a fairly impressive package of documents and a decent premises, but organizing a home confectionery will cost less and take less time. Everyone chooses how to start a confectionery business based on their financial and organizational capabilities, and experience in this industry.

Here you can download a mini-bakery business plan for free.

Selection of assortment

If you read any story on the topic “How I became a pastry chef at home,” it will become obvious that it is the type of product that is the fundamental factor in the formation of a business. Before opening your own cafe, you need to carefully study the offers that already exist on the market today.

Of course, it is best to first of all focus on the fact that a novice businessman himself loves to cook and eat. In this case, the pastry chef is already familiar with the recipe and features of preparing delicious desserts. However, you need to understand that finished products should also be in demand among buyers.

If you listen to experts on how to become a pastry chef at home from scratch, they will say that first of all you should concentrate on one product. For example, you can make lemon pies, cakes, puff pastries and even bread. An idea like this will help you stand out from the crowd that offers a standard set of baked goods.