In almost every job I’ve had, I started out ignorant. The great thing about knowing little or nothing about a field is that I start with few assumptions, bad habits, etc. Instead, I try and find the smartest people in the new field, and pick their brains. I ask a lot of questions, and listen carefully. I’m frequently amazed what you can learn, just by listening!

I treated the bakery business like any other green field. I did some basic research (market size, major players, growth segments, and various predictions), and then I reached out to local authorities.

In the meantime, we needed to make some cookies. We found a cake bakery that was closed on Mondays, and offered to rent their space for Mondays only. Easy money for them, access to commercial facilities for us. We spent about 6 months in our ‘Monday kitchen.’ We learned how to produce more cookies in less time. We hired only employees who could work on Mondays. In many ways, we built our business around ‘Must get all production done on Monday.’ We became very good at the choreographed ballet that was a typical Monday, so much that it became a hard habit to break, later!

On the face of it, cookies, or any food business, looks deceptively easy. Flour, butter, sugar, some spices, maybe some chocolate chips, and you make something fantastic. Run the numbers – if you can produce a cookie for ten cents of materials, and sell it for a dollar or more, that’s a pretty good margin! The skill required is not apparent. Many of us learned to make cookies during elementary school, right? There turn out to be a few obstacles to making it big in the food business. Here are just a few…

SCALING

Mixing two dozen cookies is pretty easy. Making fifty or a 100 dozen at a time is a different trick altogether. How much is fifty times ‘a pinch of salt’? Cooling two pounds of dough? Put it in the frig for a few minutes. Cooling 50 pounds of dough? You need a big frig, and more than a few minutes! Scooping two dozen cookies? Two minutes. Scooping 600 cookies? After an hour, your hands are sore! Baking two pans? Twelve minutes and you’re done. Baking 20 pans? In a regular oven, that’ll take a day! Packaging them is different. Getting baked cookies into customers hands is different.

REGULATIONS

It turns out that governments (at every level) are concerned with protecting citizens from various forms of bad cookies. There are government authorities that you’ve never heard of, that regulate this industry. They know about your little bakery business long before you know about them. I don’t know how, exactly. They have regulations for every aspect of your business, including those you haven’t thought of, yet.

INSPECTIONS

It’s hard to describe inspections to anyone who hasn’t experienced them. Imagine having your annual physical exam being performed by your favorite DMV employee, who’s having a bad day – inspections are kind of like that. Now picture having 7 or more inspections a year. Don’t believe me? The Fire Department checks your safety procedures. The Water Department checks to make sure you’re not wasting water. The Sewer Department makes sure you’re not disposing of the wrong waste. The County Health department makes sure you’re producing and storing food safely. The State Health department makes sure you’re labeling your products correctly. A different County Health inspector looks at how you’re handling and selling your product safely at the Farmers Market. (Do you do business in more than one county? They each have different rules!) Did I leave anyone out? Yes. The Department of Homeland Security wants to know how your cookie business might be useful in a time of national emergency. Yes, cookies (food supply) are part of national security planning. Who knew?

INCOMPETENCE

Let’s start with mine. When we agreed to start the bakery, I told my wife “I’ll do anything that needs to be done – just don’t ask me to bake!”  Ha-Ha-Ha! I could burn a frozen pizza. Why would anyone ask me to bake cookies? Well, when the Chief Cook is not around, someone has to do it, and no one knew better than me, so… Just a few months later, I find myself agonizing about the 500 cookies in the oven! [Pro-tip – If they look done, they’re already overdone. Cookies will continue to cook for several minutes after they’re removed from the oven. ‘Carryover’ baking means the cook has to remove them from the oven at the right moment, not when they look done!]

FRICTION

To optimize our use of time and materials, we studied every activity. We found an impressive amount of time was spent cleaning. When you’re cleaning, you’re not making cookies. If you don’t clean, well, let’s not go there. It turns out that letting the kitchen team self-organize works better than any top-down direction. The team has the best ideas about where time can be saved.

COMPETITION

Strangely enough, not everyone was happy to have a new vendor at the Farmers Market. People who sold mediocre cookies, for example, were not pleased. Bakeries who sold other tasty goods did not welcome the oohs and aahs our cookies routinely caused. Sometimes they decided to go in to the cookie business themselves. We welcomed this, and challenged the competition at every turn.

POLITICS

What? Politics in the cookie business? Yes, I’m afraid so. A bakery with an inferior product might not be content to be humiliated by customers making choices. Instead, they might try to limit customer choice by political means. In this area, our loyal, vocal, customers were our best allies

ECONOMICS

Clearly we took quite a risk, going in to a business we knew little about. Even better, we launched our business into the teeth of the 2008 economic meltdown. Shortly after we signed the lease on our new bakery, we saw the price of gasoline go from $2/gallon to over $4/gallon. Sugar, eggs, dairy, and chocolate all got expensive in a hurry. Our market changed, we had to adjust to survive.

INFLECTION POINTS

In nature, everything is either growing or dying. The same is true of a business. About once a year, we’d recognize that we’d hit a plateau. We’d assess the situation, and ask “How are we going to double this business again?” One year, I said “Either we find a small army of people we don’t like very much (to hand scoop cookies), or we invest in automation.”

The above is just a sampling of the issues and odysseys of the bakery business. I was shocked at how little information is on the Web about this process. The regulating agencies barely know their own slice, and aren’t aware of each other. The Bakers associations are dominated by retail bakeries. Retail bakeries have a very different set of issues than our wholesale bakery operation. In short, it was a process of continual (usually remedial) education – and that leads us to the next chapter.

NEXT – “Software is eating the world, cookies first!”, or “How Software Development prepared me for the Cookie Business.”