[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?
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Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?
Hoping someone can tell me about what it takes to become a
professional baker. Did you go to school for it or learn on the
job? What is the job market like? Do you consider it a good
career?
Author : idontwantthis
Score : 106 points
Date : 2021-10-16 10:41 UTC (12 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| drawqrtz wrote:
| Sorry for the off topic question: Do you think specialising in
| one type of baked good e.g. coconut cake and offering delivery of
| handmade,high quality goods to a small subscriber base would
| work? I estimated would need to ship several cakes per day, so it
| does seem hard to make a living of it
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Just one anecdote, but one that might temper expectations: A
| friend of mine with two decades of experience who'd already
| proven herself indispensable at a famous (and completely
| dysfunctional) NYC French restaurant looked around for the next
| step in her career. She interviewed at a highly competitive
| Michelen star restaurant in Manhattan and got the offer: minimum
| wage and an expected 60 hours a week. While they charge a typical
| customer 200-300 a dinner. That was before the pandemic.
|
| She wondered what the point of striving in the field was if
| that's what it was like at the top. She's since moved to a state
| where recreational use of cannabis is legal and makes more money
| healing people with chocolate than she ever did baking. Has
| weekends again. No sociopathic or sexual abuse from coworkers.
| Consistent peaceful workload. Creative and high craft output
| instead of crank-out-that-coconut-cake-again.
|
| This is just one story and it may not last once the industry
| consolidates, but now is an excellent moment for bakers' mental
| health to shift to producing edibles.
|
| Edit: Beware the expensive culinary schools. They can be a lot of
| money and don't necessarily help finding employment. Akin to
| bootcamps and art institutes.
| ckdarby wrote:
| Have a friend who worked a year at a one star restaurant making
| basically minimum wage but then left to do private
| cooking/private dining. Cleared $200k last year.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Yep, I think that's the way. No matter the vocation. Cut out
| the management tier as much as possible between you and your
| customer.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I don't have much to add to this but it reminded me of this blog
| article about running a bakery business on Postgres and Emacs
| https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/ there's also a
| few more articles on that blog about his transition from Software
| Engineer to Baker. I have no idea if he stuck with it, maybe you
| could reach out to him?
|
| Edit: although the website is down the Twitter and Facebook pages
| for the business still seem active.
| emacsen wrote:
| My family owned and operated a full service bakery. That means
| they did everything from breads, to cookies, to cakes, to
| weddings and special orders, as well as seasonal favorites.
|
| Being a baker is _hard_. Your staff has to be there nearly all
| the time prepping, proofing, baking, selling, you 're competing
| with not only supermarkets but also operations like Costco/Sam's
| Club which can produce high quality baked goods at very low
| prices, etc.
|
| Also remember that your operation is like a factory where you're
| always dealing with storing supplies, which expire in a matter of
| weeks sometimes, and then your produced goods expire in a matter
| of days.
|
| Also, you'll be dealing with customers whose only experience is
| supermarket bread, which doesn't go stale, doesn't mold, etc. and
| they will think your product is inferior if it does.
|
| I think things have changed since when I was a kid in the 80s,
| but if I were to start a bakery now, I'd be thinking about niche
| products- focus on a tiny market segment, specific to specific
| groups- health conscious, gluten free, specialty flavors or some
| other segment that is going to be willing to pay for a premium
| product. Do not try to compete on price.
|
| I'd be thinking about marketing heavily, and I'd think about
| creative outlets for both producing and selling.
|
| For example, maybe sell at a farmer's market instead of a
| storefront. For production, rent a commercial kitchen instead of
| fronting the money for making equipment, selling online or
| subscriptions as well. Basically cut your costs as much as
| possible while you do your proof of concept.
| test001only wrote:
| Curious, why doesn't supermarket bread go stale as quick as
| bakery bread? Is it because they use some sort of preservative
| (I could not find anything obvious in the ingredients list)?
| emacsen wrote:
| It's a combination of factors. First, as the other replies
| mentioned, there are preservatives and stabilizers in
| supermarket breads.
|
| Also, any bread in a plastic bag won't go _stale_ as quickly,
| but it can grow mold due to the presence of moisture, but
| factory bread contains things like calcium propionate that
| inhibit mold growth.
|
| Bread without preservatives and kept out of a plastic bag
| will go stale in a short time (a couple of days maybe).
| wrycoder wrote:
| Stand it on the cut edge and cover it with a thin dish
| towel.
| zo1 wrote:
| According to google: Some common bread preservatives include
| calcium propionate, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, and
| sorbic acid.
|
| Also, last I read about it, there is some trick or loophole
| that allows them to use additives for bread making that don't
| need to be listed in the ingredients list. Google bread
| making enzymes, that's their umbrella term IIRC.
| senorsmile wrote:
| My wife went to CIA and is starting a local gluten free bakery
| while I keep the full time tech job and help out here and there.
|
| We are starting very slowly; almost entirely word of mouth for
| now. We intend to build our base slowly.
|
| There is certainly demand for gluten free baked goods. We will
| hopefully be able to hire someone soon.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I was not a pro baker, but I worked at a culinary school for a
| while, so I picked up a little indirect knowledge (which now
| might be a little out of date). Culinary school is a very 'it
| depends' proposition. A good school will give you some good
| preparation for working in a commercial kitchen. It might give
| you a little leg up in hiring. It can be fairly expensive. Entry
| level wages are (or were at the time) low. Right now, with worker
| shortages, it might be easier to walk in and get such a job
| without school. Long term, you might be looking to owning your
| own shop, teaching, writing cookbooks, etc.
| Ayesh wrote:
| Not a baker, but I recently started a business that I hired a
| professional baker. We currently bake brownies, gateaux/butter
| cakes, cup cakes, and macarons.
|
| > Did you go to school for it or learn on the job?
|
| Well the baker I employ has a formal diploma, and it indeed
| helped a lot. It takes time to develop ones own recipes, but
| having some practice from another chef makes a huge difference.
|
| > What is the job market like?
|
| Speaking from the employer's perspective, it really wasn't that
| difficult to find our current chef. However, each chef certainly
| has their own touch, and it would be difficult for us to change
| our current chef and expect the same quality from someone else.
| The rates we negotiate are competitive, and my highest cost so
| far.
|
| > Do you consider it a good career?
|
| I think so. Our chef certainly enjoys his craft, and I find it to
| be a very rewarding art myself too. However, it doesn't fall into
| those lucrative jobs that brings a ton of money unless you become
| a head-chef of a bigger business.
|
| If you were to run the business by yourself, it still can be as
| not as lucrative because we found it a bit difficult to make ends
| meet until we build up a good customer base. It takes us nearly 2
| cakes and 12-24 brownies sold a day to break-even the rent,
| depreciation, utilities, staff costs, etc. Any month below this
| threshold is a loss-making month.
|
| However, when things are busy, it tends to be stressful.
|
| Things like Macarons are rather risky to bake as they are more
| fragile and even small changes such as a change of color and
| shape needs us to redo the entire thing. They also need to be
| made afresh for almost every order. We try to offset this
| repetition with items like cheesecakes and gateaux cakes, which
| can be safely frozen for days. Brownies, which we can bake and
| keep for three days, etc.
|
| At our worst days, we had the chef working nearly 12 hours a day,
| and me driving for better half of the day making deliveries. We
| could of course optimize all these, but I suppose there will
| always be packed days once in a while.
|
| I'm a software architect, and I find software industry and the
| baking industry to be different as day and night.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| A cake and 2 dozen brownies a day to make rent eh? What's in
| them brownies?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I was a mixer general grunt at a bagel shop, also worked at a
| donut shop, but I have a feeling you are looking to jump in a
| little above that.
|
| In general in the culinary world, schooling is like 90% a scam.
| You dont know how many culinary graduates I trained when I was
| just someone two years into the industry with a philosophy
| degree. People do get value out of it, and the debt is relatively
| small compared to regular college, but unless you go to like CIA
| you are going to be in the same boat as someone just off the
| street.
|
| That said, the job market for pastry/bread is more competitive,
| they are special jobs in the whole domain. and you will likely
| have to prove yourself as a general cook before you can get to
| work with bread. Any bakery is not going to take a chance with
| someone without experience, so you need to get your experience in
| a kitchen.
|
| Things in food service are not going to be "careers" the way you
| want them to be. you will not have any benefits, and you will
| find there is very little room to progress beyond taking the
| plunge and doing your own venture. in the united States at least,
| if you work in a kitchen/food service, you are usually in near
| constant precarity or you are working over 60 hrs a week. there
| is little reward beyond the camaraderie of your team and the
| satisfaction of making things on your feet. and the beer at the
| end of a shift.
|
| I had some great times, but if you are presumably doing Dev work
| so far in your life, get ready for physical/mental/emotional
| challenges like you have never imagined. Coding is a million
| times easier than anything I had to do in food service
| schwartzworld wrote:
| > the debt is relatively small compared to regular college,
|
| Unfortunately the pay is also relatively small when compared
| with the kind of jobs a college graduate might apply for. It's
| not bad once you get your own kitchen, but I've known some very
| skilled cooks who started at $10 an hour at their restaurants.
| Culinary degree and all
| zengargoyle wrote:
| Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be
| industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New
| Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in
| the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody
| breathing. It's a fun hacker story.
|
| I applied and they told me I was overqualified so I played the
| "starving actor" card. I do computers and stuff but need a blah
| blah job to pay the rent. Bagels on that mid-industrial scale
| are more assembly line like engineering. Cut the dough, feed it
| into the former, put it on a tray, freeze or proof and bake,
| coat with things if needed, fill boxes... it's more of just a
| process.
|
| A few weeks later the boss comes out for like the third time
| for a gripe session complaining about all of the wastage
| happening during the proofing process. Engineer brain piped up
| and blurted out "your doing it wrong". Gah! do it this way. The
| boss turns to the floor manager and promptly sends him out
| shopping for a list of items and the next day my procedure was
| implemented and all was well. A week later the boss calls me
| into the office with the owners. They can't do much but slip me
| a goodly amount of cash under the table.
|
| Not to long after I was the mix-master coming in at 3am with
| the boss to get the work started and prepare the days
| production run and we'd bash out a significant amount of
| product in the couple of hours that it took for the rest of the
| workers to come in for their shifts. Then he'd go to the office
| and I'd just mix up new batches of dough or go make some boxes.
|
| Pretty much walked out every day with enough bagels to fill
| myself and my housemates.
|
| I would agree in the end, that sort of "baker" is pretty much
| dead end. There aren't really advancement positions much beyond
| mix-master or floor manager, it's a sparse field.
|
| I actually found "baker" trivially easy compared to Dev/CS
| work. Same with "residential dining" or "warehouse management".
| If it's large enough it's just another procedure/process
| problem that you can hack into shape just like programming.
| senectus1 wrote:
| I used to be. I completed my 4 year apprenticeship (plus a 1 year
| pre-apprenticeship and a few years just working in a country
| bakery)
|
| 25+ years ago.
|
| I got bored of the same daily grind every day and changed career
| to IT... am still in that space now.
|
| I have considered going back but not really. the money is too
| good and the job is alway ALWAYS a challenge.
|
| (Australia btw...)
| sushsjsuauahab wrote:
| Knew a guy who ran bread ops at a normal bakery. He slept poorly
| and eventually quit because lifting was hurting his back..
| jmpman wrote:
| Not a baker, but a local bakery popped up recently in Phoenix.
| It's a high end French patisserie, easily equalling anything I've
| had in Paris.
|
| The baker comes from Switzerland where he was previously a
| banker. He has no formal baking training, and yet produces the
| highest quality products.
|
| Although the demand for high end French pastries is relatively
| low in Phoenix (there is no competition), he's found a core
| customer base that clears him out every Saturday.
|
| www.labelleviebakery.com/
|
| In a large enough metropolitan area, his formula could be
| replicated with great success.
| ksec wrote:
| This. ( Not a baker but used to work in commodity trading and
| Food sector )
|
| Which is in response to the first comment. You cant compete on
| commodity. And you really shouldn't be. Doesn't matter which
| market it is you are always going to lose to economy of scale,
| i.e Grocery Store. You have to compete on specialty. I believe
| high end French patisserie is a market of massive growth.
| Unfortunately these type of business are unattractive to VC.
| yial wrote:
| You may want to check out the Bread Bakers Guild of America.
|
| https://www.bbga.org/
|
| When you say professional baker, are you talking about owning
| your own small bakery that does a little of everything each day?
|
| Are you talking about owning a shop that does limited consumer
| sales but sells hundreds of loaves, rolls, etc daily across
| dozens of restaurants ?
|
| A high end pastry chef?
|
| I'm not a professional baker, but I am friends with someone who
| operates the second option. They went to school for hospitality-
| their family owned a hotel.
|
| They sell a limited selection to super markets and restaurants.
| They do operate a small retail store and sell at farmers markets
| as well. They don't sell pastries of any kind.
| sircastor wrote:
| A former coworker of mine was a professional pastry chef before
| she switched to software development. She said the salary ceiling
| was quite low (40k-50k in a hotel) which is one of the reasons
| she moved. IIRC, she's now writing software for a major
| investment firm, making bank.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I ran a bread baking business for a year in suburban TX, and I
| can safely say that it doesn't matter how good you are: profit
| margins are really low in certain areas. People were extremely
| cost sensitive. Also they often didn't even like "fancy" bread,
| and would complain about anything different from just regular
| sliced grocery store foam.
|
| I got pretty good, and was able to have some "subscriptions" back
| before that was a thing, delivering it to people at work, but in
| the end I was barely able to cover the costs once I'd factored in
| running the oven. I then moved to the northeast , where people
| care about bread a little more, but again are usually quite
| sensitive to convenience and price. The groceries here have
| average bakeries in store, and produce cheap reliable bread.
|
| As for cake baking, that's a whole different ballgame. I've had a
| friend who tried that and she had a very hard time. People
| typically were extremely price sensitive, and were very hard to
| please. It reminded me of the tattoo business: a few rockstars
| charging 10k for art that gets thousands of upvotes on social
| media, then a mass of people doing $100 specials for customers
| who are never quite happy. Kind of a bummer, so my friend gave up
| after a year and doubled down on programming as a career. She now
| keeps baking firmly in the "hobby" realm, since while she loves
| it, she knows it's extremely hard to make a living doing it.
| tmm wrote:
| You've hit on something I've been thinking about a lot lately
| in price sensitive markets (which is basically anything in the
| consumer space). You're better off being very expensive ($10k
| tattoo artist) than broadly appealing.
|
| I've seen it mentioned here a lot w.r.t. freelance web
| developers, but my friends in the trades are aware of it too.
| Be expensive. It filters out the terrible customers and gets
| you people who are willing to pay (and wait) for quality work.
| The difficult part, I think, is knowing your market well enough
| to know what that threshold is. There is a lot of hysteresis in
| pricing - you can easily be too expensive for the cheap
| customers, but not expensive enough to make up for the
| reduction in paying jobs.
|
| The hard part is you have to know your market really, really
| well. And you may not be able to apply that model to every job.
| No matter how rich your customer is, they're probably not going
| to pay $1000 for you to change a lightbulb. On the other hand,
| there are plenty who will pay you $20k for work that your
| competition is quoting $5k for.
|
| And the closer your chosen field is to art, the greater that
| gap can be. If you want to be a baker, you can't compete with
| grocery stores for the $30 birthday cake market, but you can
| make $6k wedding cakes and corporate event cakes. You might
| only make one cake a week, but isn't that better than having to
| crank out 200 sheet cakes with terrible baby pictures printed
| on them?
| paulcole wrote:
| >You're better off being very expensive ($10k tattoo artist)
| than broadly appealing.
|
| This is like saying you're better off playing in the NBA than
| shooting hoops in the park. Yes, anyone can shoot hoops in
| the park and make $0 but wouldn't it be so much better to
| play in the NBA and get paid millions?
|
| It sounds great in theory but you better hope you have the
| talent, drive, and luck to make it happen.
|
| Baking a $30 cake and baking a $6,000 cake are totally
| different ballgames and the actual baking is quite different
| and the business part of it requires totally different
| skills/network/etc.
| mynameishere wrote:
| I don't know about the NBA but if you look at the stunning
| difference between Mike Trout's salary (35 million/year)
| and an AAA minor league player's (700/week) you might be
| even more stunned by the difference between their batting
| averages (ie, around .100).
|
| Point is, once someone gets "in the game" and isn't just
| playing for fun, valuations get really strange. As another
| example, I am impressed by the salaries at Facebook when it
| is still just a particularly herky-jerky Myspace clone, or
| at Youtube, which is the same website it always was 10+
| years ago ("But now with TWO types of annotations no one
| asked for.") What are all those geniuses doing? They aren't
| even batting above average as far as I can tell.
|
| ...
|
| As for baking, I knew a professional baker when I worked in
| a restaurant. Man, that guy was miserable and weird. He
| made nice-looking stuff third shift for the next day, but
| knowing him, I wasn't about to eat any of it.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| > you might be even more stunned by the difference
| between their batting averages (ie, around .100).
|
| You have to account for both sides of that equation,
| though, and consider the skill of the pitchers being
| faced by the minor leaguer.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Baking a $30 cake and baking a $6,000 cake are totally
| different ballgames and the actual baking is quite
| different and the business part of it requires totally
| different skills /network/etc._
|
| I don't think that's true. The difference between two cakes
| is down to who baked them, not the price. There are amazing
| bakers making fantastic $30 cakes, and great bakers making
| brilliant $6000 cakes, and there are terrible bakers making
| awful $30 cakes and others making awful $6000 cakes. You
| can't tell whether a baker's cake is any good by what they
| charge.
|
| No doubt the technique for baking a $30 cake and a $6000
| cake is different (the sizes are probably different for a
| start) but any good baker could work at either end of the
| scale. It is absolutely not like basketball where things
| like genetics (height, lung capacity, heart size, etc)
| enter into it. No one is a naturally good baker.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This isn't true at all! You can't have ordered many cakes
| for weddings and large parties. There are plenty doing a
| good job who would not be able to move on to richer
| clients. There is significant variation in design skill,
| baking skill and equipment out there among professionals.
| Visual taste, food taste, steady hands, and stamina are
| three natural traits I've noticed and there are probably
| others in great bakers and chefs.
| yunohn wrote:
| > No one is a naturally good baker.
|
| While baking/cooking may not relate to physical genetics,
| it is definitely linked to creativity and such. Not
| everyone can be a Masterchef.
|
| > I don't think that's true. The difference between two
| cakes is down to who baked them, not the price.
|
| It is true? Everything you listed are things that are
| influenced by both the baker and the price. Not everyone
| can handle the stress of managing multiple high-end event
| deliveries while fulfilling the nuanced needs and quality
| expected of a 10k cake vs a 100$ cake, and so on.
| paulcole wrote:
| Closing a $6,000 deal with a decision maker at a big
| company is different than closing a $30 deal with my
| grandpa. Getting on the radar of the decision maker at a
| big company is a different skill than getting my
| grandpa's attention.
|
| The difference has very little to do with the cake.
|
| A fair number of high-priced wedding cake makers just use
| boxed cake mix. It's the decorating and the security that
| they're not going to fuck up the wedding day.
| awillen wrote:
| No one is making awful $6000 cakes (or at least they're
| not selling them). You can absolutely tell how good a
| baker's cake is by how much they charge, assuming they're
| actually making sales. Someone who is consistently
| selling cakes for thousands of dollars is a very good
| baker.
|
| Beyond that, you have to bear in mind that $30 cakes and
| $6000 cakes are basically different products. The former
| is a dessert and the latter is closer to art. A very
| successful baker making $30 cakes is more like the head
| chef at a restaurant than a home baker - they're running
| an operation that's making those cakes at scale (because
| there's a limit on how successful you can be selling $30
| cakes that you make yourself - only so many hours in the
| day).
|
| A baker making $6000 cakes is making hands-on, labor-
| intensive creations, and while that person may have some
| staff, they're involved in each cake. Their work doesn't
| scale the way the large-scale $30 cake operation does,
| but they can make lots of money in the same way a high-
| paid lawyer does - basically a very high hourly rate for
| their work.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You are right, but I think it applies in smaller
| increments.
|
| To get back to bread, selling fancy cakes for 10$ and not
| 4$ might not seem a big deal, but it can be enough to
| upgrade all the ingredients while staying in your comfort
| zone skill wise.
|
| The competition gets smaller, and while you're now priced
| the same as some superstar shops, you clients will still be
| happy if it's clearly better than the 4$ cakes next door.
|
| In a way NBA is a regulated market, most markets don't
| behave that way.
| zippergz wrote:
| I've seen this play out in other (mostly creative) fields as
| well. But it is not without its challenges. Namely, the
| people who will pay the very high prices tend to come in via
| reputation and referrals. You can't generally just throw up a
| website and some AdWords as a brand new baker and start
| pulling in five-figure clients. They either want to hear from
| other people who trust that you're the person to go to, or at
| least you need a portfolio of similar work. And of course
| therein lies a bit of a catch-22. You can't get high end
| clients without having other high end clients. No number of
| $30 birthday cake clients are going to give you credibility
| with $6k wedding cake clients.
|
| Cake baking is one example where you might be able to work
| around this somewhat by just baking high end cakes for _no_
| client, posting them on social media, and hope to pull in a
| few brave first customers. But for trades like tattoos where
| there's really no way to do it without a client, it's tough.
| I have no experience with tattoos, but I'm guessing that in
| that world the high end customers want to see that you have
| tattooed beautiful things on other beautiful people. If your
| current client base is average looking people who mostly get
| boring or trashy tattoos, you can't just quadruple your
| prices and expect it to work.
| brudgers wrote:
| There's no Catch-22 if you know the potential clients
| socially...or your parents and grandparents do.
|
| It's not that that advantage means a person doesn't have to
| work hard. It means that hard work is more likely to
| produce success.
|
| Even more important the social connections make hard work
| more likely to produce success. Prior familiarity with
| $6000 cakes creates intuition regarding where to prioritize
| efforts and where efforts don't produce returns.
|
| For example, what is the optimum resource commitment to the
| cake box. About how good does it need to be? Not enough is
| bad. Too much is money left on the table.
| EveYoung wrote:
| Having worked in the luxury industry before, my experience
| is that it really comes down to personal connections and
| branding. The problem is that positioning yourself as a
| true luxury player takes years (even in local markets) and
| until then you're still have to pay rent for high-end
| locations, PR, and equipment. There is a reason why most
| successful founders have strong industry connections and/or
| excellent references.
| brudgers wrote:
| With high end goods and services It's not enough to know the
| market.
|
| Cultural fit is critical. To be in the metaphorical $6000
| cake segment of the cake market, you have to hit all the
| social notes on cue that customers in the metaphorical $6000
| cake market want their $6000 cake makers to hit.
|
| What I mean is that the architect who designs golf course
| clubhouses has to be fun to play golf with to establish and
| maintain relationships with potential and current clients.
|
| Delivering a $6000 cake cake experience to the sort of event
| that pays for a $6000 cake runs on the razor edge of servant
| and served without questioning the absurdities around $6000
| cakes.
|
| And if a person likes making cakes, bringing the joy of cake
| to 200 clients may be more satisfying than catering to people
| who suppose themselves intrinsically entitled to being
| catered to.
|
| Obviously I know where I fall on that equation. From personal
| experience for whatever that's worth.
| wrycoder wrote:
| > on the razor edge of servant and served
|
| An incisive comment for the times. It brings 'farm to
| table' to mind.
| nautilius wrote:
| I read an interview with a watchmaker once. He used to make
| watches in the $2000 range, before moving on to watches much
| more expense (I forgot the number, $50,000?). The reason was
| simple: someone buying a $2000 is often there for a once-in-
| a-lifetime purchase - graduation, marriage, etc. Someone able
| to spend $50,000 on a watch typically will have no issues to
| start collecting them and buying many more.
| vmception wrote:
| I've been thinking about that regarding tourbillons. This
| is the now-unnecessary but aesthetically pleasing component
| that has made some watches not mass produceable for 200
| years. Over the last several years some enterprisers mostly
| in China have finally refined robotic processes to make
| them. The watches styles that are 5 and 6 figures in price
| are now around $1000. But, for now, I am still thinking I
| wouldn't be caught dead wearing one of those.
|
| But because of the scam-like (or at least "rip off") nature
| of liking a brand that is using an inferior manufacturing
| process at 10x the price, I now have a quagmire where I
| wouldn't want to be seen owning the more expensive ones
| either!
|
| But fortunately there is good news: almost nobody knows the
| more prestigious brands if it doesn't say "Rolex". So you
| get to blend in. Even thieves will go after the Rolex over
| the more expensive Breguet, I doubt aesthetics are a
| factor, only because of the name brand recognition in
| consumptive pop culture.
| mooreds wrote:
| Interesting! I have questions. * Did he
| have to start off in the 2k range before he had the
| skills/brand to make the 50k watches? * Did he take
| any steps to avoid getting trapped in the 2k market (too
| busy making 2k watches to make a 50k watch) * Were
| there any intermediate steps up to 50k or was it 2k->50k
| directly? * Are the inputs for a 50k watch
| significantly more expensive?
|
| I imagine you won't have the answers (unless you can dig up
| the interview), but what a fascinating story with lessons
| for software. I've read plenty about avoiding the $9/month
| SaaS customer in favor of the $500/month or $10k/month
| customer, but it is interesting to see it play out in a
| different, consumer focused space.
| nautilius wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't remember the details, but from
| what I recall it was 'simply' a conscious decision on his
| part to switch his customer base, so it seemed that
| tooling/parts/skills/money were not the problem. I
| assume, as always, that luck has to be involved for
| someone to discover you and think you're worthy of their
| money. Then again, just the price tag alone may signify
| that you're worthy (remember that iPhone app 'I am rich',
| that did nothing but cost a couple thousand dollars?).
| _Especially_ if your target audience really doesn 't care
| about the price at all and can just afford to buy it as a
| novelty, to be the first to have watches from that new
| unknown brand, before it was cool.
|
| But the story had an immediate impact on how I thought
| about many products and marketing.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| As a previous goldsmith, I'd say it's the materials used
| (gold/platinum over silver) and the time one puts into a
| piece. Gold is easier to work with than silver as you
| don't have to worry about fire-scale and it's more
| malleable, so if you're able to produce a piece in
| silver, or stainless steel for that matter, then making
| the same piece in gold just comes down to investing more
| in your materials (~$1,8000 vs $30 an oz for gold vs.
| silver) for each piece. After that the time,
| embellishments are just more time invested with the
| piece.
| milesvp wrote:
| If you're interested in this topic of leveling up as a
| freelance creative, I recently came across Chris Do who
| has a lot of youtube content on this topic. There's a lot
| of good stuff, and his delivery is much better than most
| other of the similar content youtube associates with him.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I've been only on the customer side but can concur.
|
| We were buying "fancy" bread and cakes a lot at a nearby
| bakeries, but clearly the bulk of the customers and sales where
| kids on their way from school to home, and people buying bread
| for the dinner and next morning.
|
| Of course quality mattered to a point, but I don't think it
| made a difference wether it was 70% good instead of 99% good.
|
| At a point we were waiting the croissants at a store that was
| won the best award that year, and behind us the local residents
| were pretty bitchy about having to wait 5min for the next
| batch, and ended up going to another store farther from there.
| js2 wrote:
| > Also they often didn't even like "fancy" bread, and would
| complain about anything different from just regular sliced
| grocery store foam.
|
| Great Harvest seems to do well enough. The one in my area is
| always busy. They have a FAQ for potential franchisees:
|
| https://www.greatharvest.com/franchise/open-a-bakery-franchi...
| CommanderData wrote:
| Are Soft Pretzels in the bread or cake category? I.e the type
| from Auntie Anne's.
|
| Anyone know how are the margins with a Pretzel stand / your
| typical Auntie Anne's?
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| technically, it's a yeasted bread. The only thing that
| differentiates a pretzel from any other bread is that pretzel
| dough gets dipped in a basic solution before baking to create
| the brown crust
| mcaravey wrote:
| I currently own and run a bakery. We sell breads and pastries,
| and generally avoid anything custom, such as fancy cakes. We have
| things figured out enough that we'll hire people with no
| experience on the spot and train them up. We start by having them
| work the table, meaning they shape the dough into the final
| products. Its fairly safe, and as long as there is supervision
| its not usually hard. From there they can pick where they want to
| train next, be it mixing, ovens, or something else.
|
| As for my own training, I did not have any schooling or
| apprenticeship. What helped me was to hire someone with
| experience. The baker we hired didn't have a grasp of
| fundamentals (why certain things are done), but he knew enough of
| the mechanics to get us going. I spent a lot of time reading,
| researching, and learning the underlying science of things. Also
| I was just crazy enough to make large changes in production with
| minimal testing until things worked. Changes such as swapping out
| starter types in a dough...
|
| As for the job market: we are having an extremely hard time
| finding people. In Oregon minimum wage is $14/hour but you can
| drive for Amazon for over $20. Trying to strike a balance with
| labor costs and product costs has been very difficult, especially
| with Covid. Last time I priced out ingredients, a baguette cost
| less than $0.15, but the rest of the cost is 100% people. So we
| spent a ton of time getting less people involved. Today we can
| comfortably bake about 1000lbs of dough with one person mixing,
| two on the tables, and one on the ovens.
|
| One essential part of our operations is the custom software I
| wrote for managing the production floor. We track orders for
| customers in the software and on the day for baking the mixer
| just uses the iPad for how much dough to make, how much batter to
| mix, and how much of each ingredient to weigh. Then the shapers
| see a list of what breads to make out of each dough, and then the
| bakers get to see what should be baked. Because the software
| automatically calculates all the quantities, the production
| process is MUCH less mentally challenging and basically runs on
| autopilot. We are looking to actually cleanup and resell the
| software to bakeries.
|
| And finally, is it a good career? Depends a lot. We only have one
| location, so as a baker there's only so much you can climb up the
| ladder. If you really wanted to make a good career you'll need to
| learn all the jobs and learn them well. Then make your way into
| management with all the knowledge you now have. If you really
| wanted to climb, you'll jump over to a large company or one thats
| looking to become large. Be aware that large bakeries are very
| different in many ways from small operations. Our bakery is
| looking to grow a lot, and we need people to make it happen. We
| are projecting to open a second production facility in a few
| years, and we would be looking to hire all sorts of positions,
| including shift managers, general production managers, and there
| would likely also be a production manager over both facilities.
| The downside is that if you're in it because you enjoy touching
| the products, then too high up the management ladder you climb,
| the less that'll happen.
|
| With all that said, it's extremely hard to own a bakery,
| especially starting out. The capital expenditure is huge. Yes,
| the margins you get are pretty good. We are hovering around a 50%
| gross margin now which is great, but we need to increase the
| volume of product we move. I still write a ton of code for my
| other startup that we are trying to launch soon (finance, not
| baking). I personally enjoy baking a lot, but I have waaaay more
| skill with the computer, so I'm stuck balancing where to spend my
| hours in the day. Becoming a baker depends a lot on what you want
| to do with yourself.
| dejv wrote:
| My good friend is owner of artisanal bakery (as well as baker
| herself).
|
| What I can see she is happy to hire people without prior
| experience and teach them on spot.
|
| Is that good career? It depends on who will ask. Baking is blue
| collar job: pay is low and hours are long. For some it might make
| sense, for average tech worker probably not.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| The number of professional bakers on HN exceeded my estimate by
| an order of magnitude (10 vs 1). I wonder what other further-
| afield occupations I'd be surprised are represented here.
| mhb wrote:
| A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker
|
| https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/2018/11/19/ll...
| makach wrote:
| My gf's uncle is a well know baker. Workaholic. Works all night,
| sleeps a little during the day. It's hard physical work that
| requires a lot of skills and experience. If it is your passion,
| make it your career. Don't do the same mistake as I did and make
| your hobby your career. God luck!
| nqk wrote:
| Here's a yt channel about a small sour dough bread baker.
| Although I think they started by buying out another one-person-
| garage operation.
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPYHRKEqMycep7r5kO-1org
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| From a close friend who has been a baker for decades:
|
| The margins on flour, water, and salt (bread) are thin.
|
| The margins on sugar (pastries) and meat/vegetables/cheese
| (pizzas) are better.
|
| She doesn't bake bread these days, but makes a good living off of
| pizzas.
| phonypc wrote:
| This seems backwards.
|
| The flour (say 500 grams) for a basic loaf of bread should cost
| something like 50 cents, looking at U.S. prices. Water, yeast
| and salt a fraction of a cent each. You should be able to
| charge at least $3 for the resulting loaf. If you know what
| you're doing and are in the right area, maybe as much as $6?
| 6-12x markup over ingredient cost.
|
| The same bread ingredients would make the dough for a rather
| large pepperoni pizza, which you could maybe charge $20 for? A
| very conservative (I think) $2.50 of cheese and $1 of pepperoni
| would leave you at a 5x markup. Never mind tomato sauce, or the
| extra labour involved.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| The ingredients are not the only cost. Labor (time), rent,
| etc. all go into margin.
|
| A loaf of bread bakes for 30-60 minutes. A pizza bakes for
| 3-10 minutes, so you can bake a lot more pizzas than bread
| loaves in a day. You can probably also sell more pizzas than
| bread loaves in a day.
| phonypc wrote:
| Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Anyway, I
| contend that pizza is more labour intensive than bread.
|
| You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one
| pizza.
|
| No doubt that in some circumstances, pizza is a more viable
| business model than bread. I'm just skeptical that the
| margin on a pizza sale is typically better than bread.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| >Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned.
|
| Ingredients were mentioned as classifications for product
| types.
|
| >You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of
| one pizza.
|
| Not really. Maybe 2-3 decent sized loaves in the
| footprint of one large pizza, but you can also bake
| pizzas in much less vertical space, so you can have
| double the baking surface footprint for pizzas in the
| same oven volume.
| phonypc wrote:
| In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit
| most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation
| means you can't shrink the vertical space as much as you
| might like to.
|
| Anyway, it seems to me the important metric in this
| regard would be how many items per unit time a baker can
| effectively manage. Pizza requires some amount of
| attention more or less constantly. I doubt one baker can
| manage more than 5 at time, even if the oven could fit
| many more. Meanwhile that same baker can set a timer on
| an oven containing many dozens of bread loaves and forget
| about them until they're done.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a
| typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza
| deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the
| oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or
| similar short flat-top breads.
|
| Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas
| takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you
| (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net
| ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount
| of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at
| least double the required oven volume), gives you similar
| revenue, and is much harder to sell.
| phonypc wrote:
| A sandwich loaf baked in a pan should be made in a
| different style of oven, but the types of bread you're
| talking about are ideally made in the same style of deck
| oven as pizzas.
|
| To achieve that speed of pizza turnout would be quite the
| feat I think. Is this factoring in assembling pizzas?
| Checking/rotating pizzas partway through baking? The oven
| would have to be running much hotter than for the bread
| (admittedly no idea of the costs here). You'd probably
| have to use 5 separate decks to avoid slowing the bake
| when loading/unloading, 5 decks that could be packed with
| loaves rather than a single pizza.
|
| Meanwhile, I don't see why it should take more than 10
| minutes to load an oven with 3 dozen loaves. During the
| bake time, the baker can be mixing or shaping another
| batch or any other task. The pizza maker realistically
| can't be doing anything but assembling/baking pizzas.
|
| Separate from baking, pizza necessitates the added labour
| of grating cheese and making sauce, or paying a premium
| for prepared versions.
|
| No argument that 36 loaves is a harder sell than 5
| pizzas. That's sales volume though, not margin.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Margin is zero if you can't sell it.
| kibbleble wrote:
| For prep work, you can store pizza dough as little balls,
| or pre-flatten them and put them on racks, freezing many
| more pizza doughs than bread doughs. Preparing a pizza
| crust is as easy as using a press, but to make consistent
| bread you need a complicated machine that's annoying to
| clean. Bread also needs a proofer if you're serious about
| mass producing it, hence needing more space. Otherwise
| you can enjoy handcrafting your bread and cultivating
| yeast, which is another art and science all to itself.
|
| While less pizzas fit in a pizza oven than bread may fit
| in a bread oven, it's easier to prepare pizzas, easier to
| hire for, and people pay more for them.
| phonypc wrote:
| Pizza dough is bread dough, the process is the same up to
| a point. In making loaves, you will have them portioned
| as balls at some point, same as pizza. You will shape
| them and put them on racks, same as pizza (pizza
| stacks/packs more efficiently here, but that seems
| irrelevant. Bakeries aren't in the habit of mass storage
| of shaped dough). Shaping a loaf can be a few seconds
| with your hands, same as pizza. Labour saving devices,
| like a dough sheeter for pizza, is just that in either
| case: labour saving. Bread loaves can be made with or
| without a proofer, as can pizza.
|
| Preparing and hiring for something like Pizza Hut or
| Domino's is undoubtedly easier. But at an independent
| bakery, I really don't see the case for pizza being a
| higher margin item.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Pizza dough typically has oil and sugar, bread dough does
| not.
|
| Pizza dough is typically bulk fermented cold for 2-12
| days, bread dough is usually bulk fermented at room
| temperature for 1-4 hrs. Rye breads are a bit different
| and the fermentation is staged over about 36hr, at room
| temp.
| dymk wrote:
| Could a bread oven pack more efficiently than a pizza oven?
| It seems easier to put a bunch of rectangular prisms in a
| space compared to largeish disks
| CrazyStat wrote:
| If you're baking rectangular prisms you're competing with
| $2 grocery store bread. To have a chance as an
| independent baker you need to go after the more expensive
| "artisan" type breads which are typically oblong or round
| (boules) and not baked in a pan.
| phonypc wrote:
| There's plenty of "artisan" sandwich loaf, baked-in-a-pan
| bread out there.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| It may seem backwards, but it is forwards:
|
| Total ingredient cost for a $3 loaf is about $0.75. Adding in
| cracked grains or seeds brings it to c. $1.50 for a $5-6
| loaf. Total ingredient cost for a $20 pizza is about $3. This
| is for a "good" pizza. A Pizza Hut-grade pizza is probably
| $1.50-$2.00 in ingredients and sells for $9-10.
|
| Now: bakeries do not sell every loaf of bread they bake.
| Quite a bit of bread goes stale, gets made into breadcrumbs,
| thrown out, sold at discount, donated to food pantries.
|
| Pizza has much less spoilage because of the process: most
| ingredients, including the dough, are refrigerated. The dough
| needs 48h (could be as short as 24h) to ferment, but then
| stays good in the fridge for days. As long as you have a big
| enough fridge, the inventory problem is pretty simple to
| manage. Cured meats (sausage, pepperoni) have a long shelf
| life with refrigeration, as does cheese. Vegetables also last
| for days. The end result is that (albeit with some added
| costs from refrigeration) you're able to make the products
| on-demand as the orders come in. With bread, the product must
| be prepared well in advance and there's more waste.
|
| A well-run pizzeria is pretty lean on labor, too. Plenty of
| pizzerias get by profitably with one or two men in the
| kitchen and one man at the counter.
|
| But if you don't believe me, believe the market: most bread
| is produced industrially, sealed in plastic, and shipped to
| retailers on trucks. Small profitable pizzerias are
| ubiquitous.
| phonypc wrote:
| I'd love to see how one comes to these number. $0.75 is
| either very expensive flour, or a very large loaf sold too
| cheaply. Adding seeds (at what, 5-10% of the weight of the
| flour?) to a loaf doubles the ingredient cost? Glancing at
| bulk commercial prices, sesame seeds added at (the
| unrealistically high) 20% of a loaf made with 500g flour
| should be about $0.29. Poppy seeds almost gets you there if
| you use the unusually high 2018 price, at $0.65.
|
| $3 of bulk part-skim mozzarella is generously something
| like 250g worth. That's skimpy for a large pizza. The rest
| of the ingredients for this "good" pizza are free?
|
| A bakery that's throwing out too much is baking too much,
| or there's no market for their bread. That's nothing to do
| with the margin on bread being thin. Small profitable
| bakeries are ubiquitous where there's a market for them.
| See: France.
| slyall wrote:
| When I worked at in an in-store Supermarket Bakery years
| ago the target gross profit was 70%. So a $1 loaf would
| have 30 cents worth of ingredients.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Typically the method used to get these numbers is
| arithmetic. HG flour is $22 per 50# wholesale, bulk,
| delivered. Organic HG is $48 for the same. A bag of flour
| is about 30 loaves (we scale recipes to the 50# bag).
| Typically the artisanal seed stuff will get the higher
| grade flour.
|
| Shredded mozzarella is $52 per 20# wholesale, bulk,
| delivered.
|
| Et cetera.
|
| Certainly if you are in a different market, the economics
| could be different.
|
| Hope this helps you understand.
| bar_de wrote:
| Not a baker but very close to one.
|
| Bakery is learned as apprenticeship in my home, i.e. 50% school
| with other young bakers and the other half in the bakery which
| took you in. This is a very classical education type for trades
| called "Ausbildung". It takes 3 years and afterwards you can work
| or become a master/"Meister" which takes two more years. A
| Meister extends his knowledge and some years ago it was mandatory
| by law to have finished your Meister to open your own business.
| Personally this is a very good way to learn professional crafts
| and you even get payed for it - even when in school.
|
| The job market is not so nice as there are mainly bakery chains
| which don't even hire bakers by education primarily due to higher
| labor costs.
|
| However, there are some bakers who create their own small shops
| where they do everything by hand in contrast to the prefabricated
| and highly optimized bakery chains. The small shops make
| traditional bread, and you can taste it. Your stomach and
| digestive system will probably like it, too.
|
| Yes, it is a good career if you dare and risk opening your own
| store. You will attract people by the quality of your product who
| will, in exchange, not only become loyal customers but being the
| supplier for bread in Germany is a highly valued profession - an
| institution.
|
| Good people get help by other good people. This is basic human
| law. I feel having a platonic relationship with the baker I know
| and he never has IT problems for long. :)
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| > but being the supplier for bread in Germany is a highly
| valued profession - an institution
|
| You are making a good point here. Different countries will
| value quality bread and other types of baking much more than
| others.
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