: 哥们儿,我创业才4个月,现在一个月能卖4万美金左右,利润率还高达60%!跟你说说我是怎么做到的。
Okay, here's the story of how my wife and I built a $10k/month wholesale bakery and breakfast business, moving from Florida to Colorado and doing the same thing again:
My wife handles the bakery side of things and I do the breakfast and juice company. We have a massive product line, over 100 items! But it's really just variations of things like cookies, brownies, breakfast sandwiches, chia puddings, overnight oats, and cold-pressed juices. We focus on health-conscious customers in places like Boulder and Denver, so we offer gluten-free, keto, vegan, and low-fat options.
To get started, I used my camera to take photos of all our products and created a catalog on Canva with pricing and minimum order quantities. Then, I used Google Maps to find every independent coffee shop and café within a 40-mile radius, found their contact info online.
Next, we started reaching out to the shop owners, offering free samples and a catalog. Once we saw some interest, we signed a three-month lease at a commercial kitchen for $300/month. The great thing about a commissary kitchen is you get access to a fully licensed kitchen, big equipment, and can test the waters without investing a ton of money.
We got lucky with fast growth and are now at the point of not taking new customers. I only sell to 20-30 shops out of a huge prospect list. We're in the kitchen three days a week now ($1000/month rent) and have hired a few people to help with prep work. My goal is to hit $3k in daily sales, which I think is possible with my current customers by just adding a few new products. That would put us over $1 million a year in sales, with around $500-600k take-home.
Our bakery also has a corporate gifting arm that brings in another $150k per year and another $350k in sales in December alone.
The beauty of this business is that it's a win-win. Coffee shops usually don't have their own kitchens but need food, pastries, and other beverages. There's a massive opportunity to provide items where there's a gap in the market or offer better pricing or smaller minimum orders.
If your product is good, it can become a highlight for the coffee shop, attracting more customers for them. Everyone makes money, and customers are happy!
I thought I'd also share a breakdown of one of our top sellers, cinnamon rolls, to show how our margins work:
* **Ingredients Cost:** About $5.39 for a batch of 16 rolls, so $0.33 per roll.
* **Retail Price:** These are big rolls, so shops sell them for around $5.99.
* **Wholesale:** I offer shops a 40% discount on cases of 12, selling them for $3.60 each ($43.20 per case).
* **Overhead:** Factoring in kitchen rent, the total cost per case comes out to around $5.34.
Based on these numbers, our margin on cinnamon rolls is around 87%. Overall, across all our products, our margins average 58-60%.
Most shops order 2 dozen cinnamon rolls every two days, along with multiple cases of sandwiches, juices, and overnight oats.
Very interesting and concise read!
Forgive the naive question, but do you have any issues with unsold/returned stock? Or do your customers pay for the full order and it is up to them to stock/refrigerate/display/sell the goods themselves? (presumably coffee shops already have cold storage available, for example, but I was curious what your customers do if stock doesn't sell by it's "Best Before" date - or are the margins for them such that it is not a dealbreaker if they have to discount/write-off a certain amount of their stock).
I suppose the onus is on them to know what they need to order and can expect to sell. Can you help them with suggestions/pricing?