Sourdough Bread - Prospective Job and Business - How Much Can You Earn

A bakery as a business is an opportunity to realize your most daring ideas, so the question arises, how to open your own production, is it profitable or not to bake and sell bread yourself?

The production of bread and bakery products is a process that will always find its consumer. How many famous sayings are dedicated to this nourishing and tasty product! People living in the former Soviet Union eat absolutely everything with bread - both tastier and more satisfying.

The bakery can be found in almost every large city and even a small village. Large enterprises cover a vast territory, therefore it is much more difficult for them to comply with all the preferences of their consumers - here the emphasis is on mass production and providing all categories of citizens with bread that is in demand.

At the same time, the profitability is obvious - private production and reaching a smaller number of people will help satisfy the needs of almost everyone, while providing the consumer with the right to choose from a fairly large assortment. Your own bakery can be a real gift for both a small village and a large city where people have long missed fresh baked goods.

Relevance and prospects

A bakery is a multifaceted process that requires detailed market research and good advertising. If the quality of your product is high, and the location of the store is convenient, the consumer will make a good advertisement himself - information will be passed on by word of mouth, and a casual passer-by will not be able to pass by.

Mini-production is profitable because it is much easier for it to adapt to the immediate wishes of customers and rebuild its equipment. Baking bread can be just the beginning for a big business - a store should not be limited to just this product.

Assortment will be the key to successful trading. Each person wants to pamper himself not only with simple bread, suitable for any dish, but also with original pastries, dietary products and confectionery. In this case, the amount of baked product will depend on demand.

A creative approach won't hurt - experiment, add something of your own to production, and very soon your brand will become recognizable, and production of products will reach a new level.

You can download a small bakery business plan for free as a sample.

Starting capital and documents

The bread baking business requires an initial investment - you will have to fork out for renting premises, purchasing equipment, and wages of employees. All costs will depend on what scale of production you plan. For a small bakery, three hundred thousand rubles can often be enough, but with increased volumes, the amount can grow several times.

The business plan must be calculated in advance, taking into account possible costs and additional costs, only in this way your bread trade will begin on time, and customers will begin to be interested in your products.

Bread has been valued since ancient times. Russian bread is our pride, and only a Russian person can truly appreciate and respect bread. And this product is appreciated because it is the result of a huge amount of labor expended. Few people think about the way bread goes before it appears on our table. And many people work on its production: from plowmen to bakers. Here is one baker Reconomica will tell you today. His name is Oleg (popularly - Oleg the baker).

Oleg agreed to tell us about his bakery, the main feature of which is the presence of a Russian oven. By his work, he revives the old Russian traditions of baking. He also opened his online baking school in order to revive the traditions of this craft in our country.

People call me “Oleg the baker”

Hello everyone! My name is Oleg, my colleagues and clients call me “Oleg the baker”. I have my own traditional bread bakery. I have two higher educations: the first is military (I am a major in the reserve), the second is legal, I devoted 13 years to serve the country.

As I quit my job, I realized that I needed to do something, and I came to baking. I am self-taught, I learned everything from the Internet. I mainly studied on videos of foreign bakers, there are a lot of experienced bakers abroad who bake in wood-burning ovens, in Russia I have not found such specialists.

People call me “OLEG-BAKER”.

How it all began

First, I'll tell you the background of my favorite business. I came to baking by accident, about six years ago I accidentally found a video on the Internet where bread is baked in a Russian oven, and was very inspired by the idea - to build a bakery and a Russian oven, to start baking sourdough bread, like many years ago. After all, then very few people did it on a large scale. And I wanted to do something useful with my hands. So to speak, to be useful to society, to create really useful products in exchange for the gratitude of customers!

It is not at all difficult to master the profession of a baker, patience and work will grind everything! As you can see, even a lawyer can learn how to bake bread, it all depends on you! Now you can learn everything on the Internet!

I remember very well the moment when I baked my first bread. I ran to show the bread to all my friends and relatives, there was no limit to my joy, honestly. It's like the fulfillment of a long-awaited dream!

Bakery is more than a business for me!

I would not call my business a business. This is more of a hobby that smoothly turned into a family business. Money is not the main thing in my business, I am motivated by something else - to be useful to society, to make a real and useful product. And money comes on its own, because what I do comes from the heart, and my work is generously rewarded by my clients.

I have no employees, I grind flour and bake bread myself. I am thinking of hiring an assistant in the future. But so far I cannot entrust the production to anyone, I think that no one will do it better than me, but this is probably paranoia!))) You just need to take it and teach it well, which is what I do. But let's talk about this below!

Ilya Gumennov opened a franchised bakery quite recently, having gone through the entire difficult path of a novice entrepreneur - from finding a suitable establishment to mastering a special program for automating business processes. I had to spend 1.5 million rubles to launch my business. and study the financial model in detail in advance.

Entrepreneur Ilya Gumennov has been thinking about starting a business for a long time, but at first he was attracted by the idea of ​​a coffee shop. The thought of a bakery came up suddenly: from time to time he rode his bike past a bakery near his house and fell in love with the smell of fresh bread.

Investing in a new, unfamiliar area was risky - an inexperienced entrepreneur was afraid of going bankrupt. Therefore, he decided to take a closer look at the franchises of bakeries - he hoped that they would help him establish business processes and find premises, explain how and where to order the necessary goods.

Most of the franchise offers were in other cities and you had to fly to them for training. Three chains were interested in Moscow - Khlebnitsa, Makovka and Professor Poof. The bread shop demanded a substantial investment: the concept of a bakery assumes that the franchisee opens several points at once. "Professor Poof" was interested in yeast-free bread and small investments: a bakery could be opened with a budget of up to 1.5 million rubles, including a lump-sum fee. The franchisee has no royalties, the management company earns on the supply of its bread to the partners' bakeries.

Now "Professor Poof" is developing a franchise and supplying bread to large retail chains, selling soups, lunches and sandwiches, developing new lines of bread and pastries and thinking about adding cuisines of different countries to the range of bakeries.

“The craft bread market will grow, customers are paying more and more attention to the quality of the products,” says Andrey Novoselov, head of the franchise “Professor Poof. - This is proved by "Daily Bread". Their franchise costs significantly more and they are showing good growth. At the same time, the market for wide format bakeries will stagnate: rent is just as expensive there, but competition is more difficult. "

Investment Savings

Professor Poof Bakery was launched in 2021, the franchise has existed since 2021. There are two types of bakeries.

Full cycle bakeries include three large blocks: the purchase of raw materials (flour, water, butter, eggs), a full production cycle, which involves a baker, kneaders and equipment for baking - ovens, proofers, as well as a sales block.

In the bakery of an incomplete cycle, bread is brought from a large production every day.

The main advantage of a part-time bakery for a franchisee is savings on investments and a low rental price for a small area (6-10 sq. m.). The management company undertakes the purchase of raw materials and equipment, the production cycle and the recruitment of personnel.

“Our franchisees value family, they have children, more often they are over 40 years old,” notes Andrey Novoselov. "Usually they buy good bread themselves, monitor the quality of the products and are ready to broadcast this philosophy to the masses."

This guy first became a vegetarian, and then began baking homemade sourdough bread with his wife. When friends and acquaintances began to come for baking, and the guys had to bake 100 kg of bread a day, they realized that it was time to open their own workshop. Kirill Rusakov, co-founder of ProstoKhleb, spoke about his passion for healthy eating, his main mistakes in business and how a home culinary hobby has grown into a confident business.

- I love to cook since childhood, because my mother always loved it - we always had a full house of guests ... Therefore, one might say, the history of ProstoKhleb began long before in 2021 wife began to bake bread themselves.

From a small home production, a hobby has grown into a business - we have become entrepreneurs spontaneously and unexpectedly, even for ourselves. Perhaps that is why, at first, they did not pay due attention to accounting, planning and strategy.

Everything was done on a whim. This is perhaps the main mistake of our business.

Now "ProstoKhleb" has become a large shop with a million-dollar revenue. Our products are known in many cities of Russia as yeast-free sourdough bread, pies, cakes, pastries, specialty lunches. For implementation, we supply products to cafes and restaurants, we are engaged in catering at events.

This is not the first business I've managed. But the first experience was not nearly as successful. I'll tell you in order.

Stove at home was profitable

I was born and raised in Murmansk, my father was an entrepreneur - he was engaged in the wholesale trade in fish. When he was gone, I was in my first year at the institute, and I had to take on the responsibility of running a business. And everything in him was very difficult - a conflict with a partner, a huge number of personal connections on which everything was held and which my father did not have time to convey to me ... I was not able to do this - the business had to be closed.

I graduated from the institute, worked for a couple of years, and then still went on free bread. I think a new project started for me with a passion for vegetarianism in 2021. I got married and moved to Kaliningrad in 2021, where we started baking bread and other pastries at home. First, only for yourself, then for friends. And when they realized that there was interest, they created profile pages in social networks and began to work a little on order.

At that time, there was practically no competition in this business: no one made artisanal sourdough bread in Kaliningrad. And we thought that we needed to increase the turnover, expand the range - we began to bake vegetarian pies and cakes. This seriously raised our average check - monthly revenue at that time was about $ 1500.

We baked at home 100 kg of bread and 20-30 kg of confectionery a day. For apartment production, this is very, very much. We decided it was time to open the bakery.

The world is changing rapidly, technologies are developing, new professions appear, old ones disappear. A person, in order to stay afloat, must constantly learn and improve his skills. True, there are professions that a machine will never replace - these are the hands of a baker, lovingly baking every loaf of aromatic and crunchy bread.

The explosive growth in the popularity of sourdough bread is not just another hype. This is the awakening of human consciousness! Information about the dangers of "fast" yeast is spreading rapidly, which makes people go back to basics and bake healthy bread with whole flour sourdoughs.

Why are yeast-free bread bakers so in demand?

As you know, history repeats itself. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, from time immemorial, ate leavened bread. Modern (fast) yeast was invented before World War II, which accelerates the baking process by 5 times, but has a whole bunch of disadvantages in terms of its effect on the human body.

You can read more about the benefits of sourdough bread HERE.

Small artisan bakeries that try to revive the tradition of baking are popping up like mushrooms after rain. Every day the awareness of people and the demand for yeast-free bread is growing. At the same time, there is a growing need for bakers who have the skills to bake sourdough bread.

To work in such a bakery, you do not need to beat the thresholds of universities for 5 years. The first and most important requirement is the philosophy of thinking and the concept of the invaluable benefit that "living" bread gives. And baking skills can be learned in a couple of weeks. It will be enough to take a course of sourdough bread bakers, knowledge of the production technology of the main types of bread, the ability to work with sourdough, the concept of fermentation principles, orientation in the varieties of flour and other ingredients. All this knowledge can be obtained online without even leaving home.

Online Courses on Sourdough Bread

There are many online schools on the Internet today. Prices are about the same everywhere, but the quality and quantity of lessons can vary significantly. I was lucky to study at the best of them! Baking-Breads School. u, causes me especially warm feelings, since it was Natalia and Anton Kornyshov who taught me how to bake real yeast-free bread and told me about its benefits.

They are taught by real enthusiasts who love their work with all their hearts. Anton and Natalia have gone from baking bread in their home kitchen to opening their own bakery. A great desire to share their experience has grown into an online school, where everyone from any corner of the world can master this difficult craft right at home.