Start Your Farmstead Bakery
Want to diversify your farm business mix by selling baked goods made in your home kitchen that use produce you have in abundance?
That is what this North Central SARE Farmer Rancher Project (FNC18-1130) is all about.
Increasing Value-added Product Sales through Cottage Food brought together a farmer-led team to create recipes using abundant items like zucchini and pumpkin and to develop professional packaging and display ideas to increase sales.
Tested recipes using farm produce
More tested, tasty and easy to use recipes that use farm-raised abundance produce meet the required water activity levels to be deemed non-hazardous and would be something you could legally sell out of your home kitchen under your state’s cottage food law.
Sure, we could bake and sell chocolate chip cookies at the farmers market, but that really wouldn’t add value to our farm. The challenge was that many typical recipes that use produce such as a traditional zucchini bread do not meet the non-hazardous requirements as they contain too much water.
Improved display & packaging
Too often, when farmers bring home baked goods to farmers markets to sell, they could easily be mistaken for a Boy Scout bake sale. While saran wrap, aluminum foil and baggies are items you typically would already have in your kitchen, they look too homespun and unprofessional in a market setting and sales are either reduced or customers are not willing to pay the true value of the actual product.
This project therefore dove into both developing the recipe collection you see on this site, each recipe with lab-certified documentation to meet the water activity requirements. We also researched and developed resources for creating attractive displays with sales-appealing packaging.
We hope you find this resource useful and please let us know how this project might have hopefully helped support and encourage your farm bakery business startup!
Additionally, while this project specifically focused on the needs of small-scale farms championing sustainable agriculture, we hope these resources can be used far and wide for anyone wanting to use more garden abundance and local ingredients in their home bakery cottage food business.
