Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?

I ran a bread baking business for a year in suburban TX, and I can safely say that it doesn't matter how good you are: profit margins are really low in certain areas. People were extremely cost sensitive. Also they often didn't even like "fancy" bread, and would complain about anything different from just regular sliced grocery store foam.

I got pretty good, and was able to have some "subscriptions" back before that was a thing, delivering it to people at work, but in the end I was barely able to cover the costs once I'd factored in running the oven. I then moved to the northeast , where people care about bread a little more, but again are usually quite sensitive to convenience and price. The groceries here have average bakeries in store, and produce cheap reliable bread.

As for cake baking, that's a whole different ballgame. I've had a friend who tried that and she had a very hard time. People typically were extremely price sensitive, and were very hard to please. It reminded me of the tattoo business: a few rockstars charging 10k for art that gets thousands of upvotes on social media, then a mass of people doing $100 specials for customers who are never quite happy. Kind of a bummer, so my friend gave up after a year and doubled down on programming as a career. She now keeps baking firmly in the "hobby" realm, since while she loves it, she knows it's extremely hard to make a living doing it.

You’ve hit on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in price sensitive markets (which is basically anything in the consumer space). You’re better off being very expensive ($10k tattoo artist) than broadly appealing.

I’ve seen it mentioned here a lot w.r.t. freelance web developers, but my friends in the trades are aware of it too. Be expensive. It filters out the terrible customers and gets you people who are willing to pay (and wait) for quality work. The difficult part, I think, is knowing your market well enough to know what that threshold is. There is a lot of hysteresis in pricing - you can easily be too expensive for the cheap customers, but not expensive enough to make up for the reduction in paying jobs.

The hard part is you have to know your market really, really well. And you may not be able to apply that model to every job. No matter how rich your customer is, they’re probably not going to pay $1000 for you to change a lightbulb. On the other hand, there are plenty who will pay you $20k for work that your competition is quoting $5k for.

And the closer your chosen field is to art, the greater that gap can be. If you want to be a baker, you can’t compete with grocery stores for the $30 birthday cake market, but you can make $6k wedding cakes and corporate event cakes. You might only make one cake a week, but isn’t that better than having to crank out 200 sheet cakes with terrible baby pictures printed on them?

I read an interview with a watchmaker once. He used to make watches in the $2000 range, before moving on to watches much more expense (I forgot the number, $50,000?). The reason was simple: someone buying a $2000 is often there for a once-in-a-lifetime purchase - graduation, marriage, etc. Someone able to spend $50,000 on a watch typically will have no issues to start collecting them and buying many more.

>You’re better off being very expensive ($10k tattoo artist) than broadly appealing.

This is like saying you’re better off playing in the NBA than shooting hoops in the park. Yes, anyone can shoot hoops in the park and make $0 but wouldn’t it be so much better to play in the NBA and get paid millions?

It sounds great in theory but you better hope you have the talent, drive, and luck to make it happen.

Baking a $30 cake and baking a $6,000 cake are totally different ballgames and the actual baking is quite different and the business part of it requires totally different skills/network/etc.

I was a mixer general grunt at a bagel shop, also worked at a donut shop, but I have a feeling you are looking to jump in a little above that.

In general in the culinary world, schooling is like 90% a scam. You dont know how many culinary graduates I trained when I was just someone two years into the industry with a philosophy degree. People do get value out of it, and the debt is relatively small compared to regular college, but unless you go to like CIA you are going to be in the same boat as someone just off the street.

That said, the job market for pastry/bread is more competitive, they are special jobs in the whole domain. and you will likely have to prove yourself as a general cook before you can get to work with bread. Any bakery is not going to take a chance with someone without experience, so you need to get your experience in a kitchen.

Things in food service are not going to be "careers" the way you want them to be. you will not have any benefits, and you will find there is very little room to progress beyond taking the plunge and doing your own venture. in the united States at least, if you work in a kitchen/food service, you are usually in near constant precarity or you are working over 60 hrs a week. there is little reward beyond the camaraderie of your team and the satisfaction of making things on your feet. and the beer at the end of a shift.

I had some great times, but if you are presumably doing Dev work so far in your life, get ready for physical/mental/emotional challenges like you have never imagined. Coding is a million times easier than anything I had to do in food service

Not a baker, but I recently started a business that I hired a professional baker. We currently bake brownies, gateaux/butter cakes, cup cakes, and macarons.

> Did you go to school for it or learn on the job?

Well the baker I employ has a formal diploma, and it indeed helped a lot. It takes time to develop ones own recipes, but having some practice from another chef makes a huge difference.

> What is the job market like?

Speaking from the employer's perspective, it really wasn't that difficult to find our current chef. However, each chef certainly has their own touch, and it would be difficult for us to change our current chef and expect the same quality from someone else. The rates we negotiate are competitive, and my highest cost so far.

> Do you consider it a good career?

I think so. Our chef certainly enjoys his craft, and I find it to be a very rewarding art myself too. However, it doesn't fall into those lucrative jobs that brings a ton of money unless you become a head-chef of a bigger business.

If you were to run the business by yourself, it still can be as not as lucrative because we found it a bit difficult to make ends meet until we build up a good customer base. It takes us nearly 2 cakes and 12-24 brownies sold a day to break-even the rent, depreciation, utilities, staff costs, etc. Any month below this threshold is a loss-making month.

However, when things are busy, it tends to be stressful.

Things like Macarons are rather risky to bake as they are more fragile and even small changes such as a change of color and shape needs us to redo the entire thing. They also need to be made afresh for almost every order. We try to offset this repetition with items like cheesecakes and gateaux cakes, which can be safely frozen for days. Brownies, which we can bake and keep for three days, etc.

At our worst days, we had the chef working nearly 12 hours a day, and me driving for better half of the day making deliveries. We could of course optimize all these, but I suppose there will always be packed days once in a while.

I'm a software architect, and I find software industry and the baking industry to be different as day and night.

From a close friend who has been a baker for decades:

The margins on flour, water, and salt (bread) are thin.

The margins on sugar (pastries) and meat/vegetables/cheese (pizzas) are better.

She doesn't bake bread these days, but makes a good living off of pizzas.

I don't have much to add to this but it reminded me of this blog article about running a bakery business on Postgres and Emacs https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/ there's also a few more articles on that blog about his transition from Software Engineer to Baker. I have no idea if he stuck with it, maybe you could reach out to him?

Edit: although the website is down the Twitter and Facebook pages for the business still seem active.

You may want to check out the Bread Bakers Guild of America.

https://www.bbga.org/

When you say professional baker, are you talking about owning your own small bakery that does a little of everything each day?

Are you talking about owning a shop that does limited consumer sales but sells hundreds of loaves, rolls, etc daily across dozens of restaurants ?

A high end pastry chef?

I’m not a professional baker, but I am friends with someone who operates the second option. They went to school for hospitality- their family owned a hotel.

They sell a limited selection to super markets and restaurants. They do operate a small retail store and sell at farmers markets as well. They don’t sell pastries of any kind.

Just one anecdote, but one that might temper expectations: A friend of mine with two decades of experience who'd already proven herself indispensable at a famous (and completely dysfunctional) NYC French restaurant looked around for the next step in her career. She interviewed at a highly competitive Michelen star restaurant in Manhattan and got the offer: minimum wage and an expected 60 hours a week. While they charge a typical customer 200-300 a dinner. That was before the pandemic.

She wondered what the point of striving in the field was if that's what it was like at the top. She's since moved to a state where recreational use of cannabis is legal and makes more money healing people with chocolate than she ever did baking. Has weekends again. No sociopathic or sexual abuse from coworkers. Consistent peaceful workload. Creative and high craft output instead of crank-out-that-coconut-cake-again.

This is just one story and it may not last once the industry consolidates, but now is an excellent moment for bakers' mental health to shift to producing edibles right now.

Edit: Beware the expensive culinary schools. They can be a lot of money and don't necessarily help finding employment. Akin to bootcamps and art institutes.

I was not a pro baker, but I worked at a culinary school for a while, so I picked up a little indirect knowledge (which now might be a little out of date). Culinary school is a very ‘it depends’ proposition. A good school will give you some good preparation for working in a commercial kitchen. It might give you a little leg up in hiring. It can be fairly expensive. Entry level wages are (or were at the time) low. Right now, with worker shortages, it might be easier to walk in and get such a job without school. Long term, you might be looking to owning your own shop, teaching, writing cookbooks, etc.

Sorry for the off topic question: Do you think specialising in one type of baked good e.g. coconut cake and offering delivery of handmade,high quality goods to a small subscriber base would work? I estimated would need to ship several cakes per day, so it does seem hard to make a living of it

I used to be. I completed my 4 year apprenticeship (plus a 1 year pre-apprenticeship and a few years just working in a country bakery)

25+ years ago.

I got bored of the same daily grind every day and changed career to IT... am still in that space now.

I have considered going back but not really. the money is too good and the job is alway ALWAYS a challenge.

(Australia btw...)