How I Increased My Hourly Wage as a Baker

When I first started attending my local Farmer’s Market, I was thrilled with the sales I was making. I almost always sold out and I was always left with enthusiasm and excitement for the next one. I guess you could compare it to when you are in the hospital with your newborn baby. You know you should sleep but you are just so excited that you can’t. Eventually you crash. That’s kind of what happened to me.

The thrill of the market eventually began to take it’s toll. I was preparing for two markets per week. It seemed as soon as I was done with one, the next one was sneaking right up. When you are living this type of reality, you quickly prioritize what is profitable and what is not. Anything that is not profitable will likely come off of your menu because you begin to value your time and recognize you can’t keep this pace up.

So before too long, I sat down and began to really calculate my hourly wage. I added up all of my ingredients and the costs of those ingredients. I calculated my overhead costs to the best of my ability. And then I timed myself making my baked goods. This is where things really got scary. What I realized is that anything I was making from scratch was significantly bringing down my hourly wage because of the time involved. Even if it was a baked good where I was quite fast…I can make sourdough bread dough incredibly quick…the fact remained that creating anything with your bare hands is going to have some time involved. It was definitely a disheartening moment because as much as I love to bake, I don’t love it enough to be spreading myself so thin to not have time for other passions or other people in my life.

So not being one to give up, I immediately began looking for solutions. The first thing I did was consider what could be added to my market stall that was not baked. This is where creamed honey came into my life and into my stall. It is also when dehydrated soup mixes became part of my menu. I also added sourdough pancake mix, sourdough starter, some baking tools and eventually my popular vanilla bean paste.

Of course, being wiser now, I also calculated the time it took me to make them as well as all other costs like I’d done for my “baked from scratch” goods. I knew my hourly wage for these items would be higher since I could make them faster but I didn’t realize just how much higher. Some of these items yielded an hourly wage of over $100 per hour. 

While I was very pleased with this, there was an added benefit in that many of these items were non-perishable. That meant I could make them in bulk and, if they didn’t sell, I would be able to store them until the next market. This was a game changer for me because up to this point, I was only bringing perishables which can be very stressful…bring too little, you sell out too early and waste a day…bring too much, you take home perishable food that cuts into your potential profits. 

One more unexpected benefit was whenever I needed a break from baking. Life happens and sometimes all that baking can just be A LOT. During those weeks, I knew that I could bake a bit less because I had all of my non-perishables. I could bring a lower amount of baked goods and share via social media that creamed honey would be stocked up. Or that our soup mixes would be on sale. Or whatever other ideas I could come up with to generate excitement and interest (and detract from the fact that my baked good quantity was lower than normal).

So, if you are attending markets or pop-ups, or if you have an online or brick and mortar bakery shop, or maybe you deliver baked goods…whatever your bakery model looks like…I highly encourage you to calculate your hourly wage as well as add some non-perishables to your business plan. There are so many benefits to doing so!