Expanding Your Baking Business’s Product Line: 3 Things To Keep In Mind
When you own a bakery, whether it’s run from home or you have a shop front with bread-laden shelves and cupcake stands, there comes a time when you want to start offering more.
You want your customers to come in more often. You want people who are just passing by to stop and give something a try. You want to invest in bigger and better equipment. And you want to have a larger range of products for people to order for special occasions.
All in all, you need to expand your product line. But before you do, you need to make sure you’ve thought carefully about what to offer and why. With that in mind, here are three essentials to remember about baking up a few new culinary treats.
What Will Each Ingredient Cost?
When you’re trying to expand a bakery, the highest costs turn up in the simplest of places. As such, you need to price items per ingredient, rather than as a whole unit.
One kilo bag of flour may turn out 1000+ cupcakes, and that equates the £2-ish cost of this bag to less than a penny per cake. But when you use the same bag of flour for other baked goods, you may be using bigger measurements, as well as turning out fewer products on the other side.
So, what once lasted you a good week is now something you have to stock up on twice a week (or more), and that doubles the cost of the ingredients (at the very least).
To make sure these costs don’t get on top of you, you need to break down where and when these ingredients are being used.
You can then price each different baked good according to the share it uses, and actually start to make a good profit off of your new products.
What Do People Want with Their Cakes?
A drink! They want something they can sip on and enjoy at the same time they’re chowing down on their favourite baked goods.
So make it easy for them to also grab a latte or a green tea when they pop in for a croissant or a cupcake.
Invest in a hot drinks machine, stock up on plenty of takeaway coffee cups and lids, and make sure your staff are trained on creating the perfect hot chocolate.
And it’s this very principle that you should always keep in mind when trying to expand your product range.
People don’t want to buy something new that they may have no interest in. They want something that’s just as sweet and tasty they can enjoy right now.
Your bakery business’s product line can grow, it can get bigger and better, but you need to be careful about the costs that add up faster than you thought possible, as well as whether or not your new offerings make sense. Make it easy and keep it simple!
This is a collaborative post.
