The past three weeks were spent in lecture learning the finer points of how bad the fat loaded confections we make are slowly deteriorating all of our lives. Seems like a fitting class to dish up to a bunch of baking and pastry students, no?
Apart from learning that our diets should contain less than 1% of the stuff I plan to spend the rest of my life making (demand doesn't look so good from this angle, trust me!), we developed a business plan, marketing strategy, menu etc. for a bakery. This was an excellent exercise in owning and operating a small business.
I chose to locate my bakery in Old Oakland, which is a small area in downtown Oakland that is seeing a lot of new development and has several new restaurants and shops. The name of my bakery was "a cakes." The 'a' being for Alison--I know it needs some work! Our menu had to be eight items and mine was as follows:
Brownie
Eclair
Chocolate Cupcake
Vanilla Cupcake
Fruit Tartlet
Chocolate Ganache Cake
Cherry-Apple Pie
New York Cheesecake
I won't go on about all of the boring details of the accounting figures, but with 1000 customers a day (that seems high to me) I was making a profit of about $60,000/year--as the owner that's my salary! So, not only did we learn a lot about small business, but also a lot about the livelihood of pastry chefs! Hey, thank goodness I'm not in it for the money or this would have been a rude awakening!
I will try to post the Power Point presentation summary of my bakery that I gave in class, stay tuned.
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1 comment:
Perhaps Southport would not be a good place for you to establish your business since we don’t have 1000 people in the area. Pretty amazing what demographics you need to succeed with a bakery business. It is really great that they are teaching business so students will have a realistic idea of what they will need to succeed should they want to open their own shop.
I wonder how many sales Charlie had per day in his Birmingham bakery??
Mom
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