How to Start a Home Bakery of Your Own

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As it turned out, our new friend was the only one of the 20 proprietors we visited who queried us on this red tape score. So, unless your experiences are very different from our own, I doubt if you need to get too concerned about the problem. Besides, it's been our experience that determination and ingenuity will carry you over any obstacles The System may put in your path toward creating an alternative to the established (straitjacketed) way of doing things. If you want "out" badly enough, you'll find a means of building the road you need to take you there.

YOUR REAL PROBLEM: COST

Sooner or later, should you try our caper, you'll find that your home bakery will live or die depending on how you control the cost of its operation. Keep your expenses down-without compromising the quality of your product, of course-and you'll make enough money to stay in business and earn a profit. Don't and you won't. A penny saved really can be a penny earned and time spent studying ways to hang onto those pennies can return worthwhile dividends.

We save money, for example, by purchasing supplies such as flour, raisins, and nuts in bulk at the Farmers' Market in San Francisco. We've been able to get nuts-our most expensive ingredient-from this source for as little as one-half the going supermarket price. It's also common for us to save 25% on the flour we buy at the Market.

Eggs, we've found, can be obtained most inexpensively when purchased "by the flat" from roadside produce stands or dairies. If you're too far from these sources, however (as we often are here in the city), you can keep your eyes on the shopping flyers for specials. A saving of four or five cents per dozen adds up when you're dealing with a large volume, as we now are.

One large and recurring expense that we still haven't whittled down to our satisfaction is the-we feel-wasteful amount of money we spend on piepans. Although our well-intentioned restaurant managers usually promise-with the most soulful sincerity-to return the pans each week they, like most people locked into The System, are usually too hurried to spend much time taking care of matters which do not directly benefit them or their employers. So we wind up buying a great number of piepans. After much haggling, we've managed to get the plates for $1.20 a dozen from a supplier over in Oakland and, unfortunately, we have to visit him far more than we'd prefer.

And remember: all those "little" errands you run for your business do add up. Car mileage is a definite cost factor with a home-operated bakery, just as it is with any enterprise. It's especially easy to pile up a surprising number of miles each delivery day so try to keep your clients as close together and as close to your home base as possible.

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