How to start a home bakery

General information, not legal advice. Rules change, and counties add their own. Check with your state and county before you start selling.

"Cottage food" is the term most states use for food made in a home kitchen and sold directly to customers. What it covers, and whether your state uses the phrase at all, differs by state.

Most guides start with recipes. Start here instead, because the order matters: two of these steps can stop your business before it opens, and they are both near the top.

1. Your state first — before the recipes, before the name

This is first because it is the only step that can make the rest pointless. What you may sell, whether you need a license, whether anyone inspects your kitchen and whether you may post a box are all decided by your state, and the answers are not similar.

Three live examples of how far apart they are:

Texas requires no permit, and health departments, in the state’s words, "have no regulatory authority to inspect a cottage food production operation" — though DSHS keeps emergency powers if there is a serious threat to health.
North Carolina inspects your kitchen before your first sale — and asks whether you have "a pet that comes into your home at any time (even if only at night)": if so, "you cannot manufacture foods from your home kitchen".
New Jersey lets you take the order and the payment online, but you may never put the food in the post.

Read your own state before you spend a dollar. We keep a sourced page per state, each one quoting the department or the statute and dated:

Georgia · Texas · California · Florida · New York · Illinois · North Carolina · New Jersey · Pennsylvania · Arizona

Your state isn’t listed yet? Search "[state] cottage food law" on your state agriculture or health department site — those are the pages worth trusting.

Two questions worth answering on day one, because they change what you build: may you sell online in your state, and may you ship. A cook in Pennsylvania can sell over the internet as part of the registration. A cook in New Jersey can take the order online and must hand the box over in person. Those are different businesses, and the difference is not your choice.

2. Pick a short menu you can repeat

The instinct is to offer everything you can bake. Resist it. A short menu is easier to price, faster to shop for, cheaper to package, and it gets better every time you make it.

Three filters that survive contact with reality:

Does your state allow it? Anything that needs refrigeration is prohibited in most states and allowed in a few. Cream and cream-cheese fillings are out in more places than people expect. Check before you build a menu around a cheesecake.
Does it travel? A dessert that is perfect on your counter and ruined in a car is a complaint waiting to happen.
Can you make twelve of them on a bad week? The thing you can repeat when you are tired is the thing that becomes a business.

Start with three to five items. Add the sixth when someone has asked for it twice.

3. Price it before you promise it

The most common mistake in home baking is not undercharging — it is pricing the ingredients and forgetting your own hours. Flour and butter are the small half of a cake. Your time is the big half, and it is the half people leave out.

Price every item before you publish a menu, not when someone asks. A price you invent in a DM while a customer waits is a price you will regret.

Work it out properly: our pricing calculator takes ingredients, packaging, your hours and rate, overhead and profit, and gives you a figure and a per-serving number. It runs in your browser and saves nothing.

Then write the numbers down where a customer can see them, which is the next page you need: a free price list template you can fill in, print and hand over.

Two habits worth having from the first order: take a deposit on custom work, because a canceled wedding cake has already eaten your week; and re-check your prices when ingredients move, because butter does not care what you quoted in March.

4. The unglamorous habits that keep you out of trouble

None of this is exciting and all of it is the difference between a business and an incident.

Labels. Nearly every state prescribes exactly what goes on one, and several prescribe a sentence you must print word for word. Your state page has the wording.
Allergens. Know what is in everything you sell, including the sprinkles. If you share equipment, say so.
Write down what you made and when. A date and a batch note costs nothing and is the only thing that answers "which cake was it?" if someone is ill.
Keep your certificate current. Where a state requires a food handler card or a manager certification, an expired one can remove the legal basis you are selling on — not just earn a warning.

5. Photos: one window, no flash, shoot before it moves

Your photo is the product until the box is open. You do not need a camera — you need light and a habit.

One window, side on. Daylight from the side gives food shape. Overhead light flattens it, and your phone's flash makes buttercream look like plastic.
Turn the kitchen lights off. Mixing daylight with a yellow bulb is what makes home food photos look muddy.
Shoot it the moment it is finished. Icing settles, bread deflates, chocolate dulls. The first five minutes are the only good ones.
Plain background, close in. A clean board or a plain cloth. Fill the frame — a small cake in a big kitchen reads as a small cake.
Two shots per item. One whole, one cut or close enough to see the crumb. The second one is what makes people hungry.

Re-shoot an item when you improve it. The photo that sold your first twenty orders is often the one holding back the next twenty.

6. Packaging is the second half of the product

Food arrives in the packaging, not in your kitchen. A cake that slid across a box is a bad cake to the person who opens it, however good it was when you closed the lid.

Fit the box to the item, not the other way round. Movement is what ruins things.
Think about the car. Everything you sell takes a journey on a seat, in summer, around corners. Test one yourself before you ship a dozen.
Make it openable. People open the box in front of their guests. A box that has to be fought with costs you the moment.
Count the cost in your price. The box, the board, the dowels, the ribbon, the label. It is small, and it is never zero — the calculator has a line for it.

Your label goes on here, and in most states it is not optional. Again: your state page has the exact requirements.

7. Take orders somewhere you can find them again

Almost everyone starts in DMs, and almost everyone hits the same wall at about order fifteen: the details of an order live in four places — a comment, a direct message, a text and a memory — and one of them is wrong.

What an order actually needs, every time:

what they want, in your words, not "the one from your story";
when they want it, and when you agreed to have it ready;
pickup or delivery, and the address if it is delivery;
the price, and what has been paid;
a phone number that reaches them on the day.

You can run that on paper, and plenty of people do. What matters is that it is in one place, that you can see tomorrow's orders without scrolling, and that nothing depends on remembering a conversation.

Two rules that prevent most problems: confirm back in writing — repeat the item, date, time and price in one message — and say no to a date you cannot make. One late cake costs more than one declined order.

8. Your first ten customers

They are not strangers. Almost nobody's first ten come from an algorithm.

Tell people you are open. Actually say it, specifically: what you make, what it costs, how to order. "I'm baking now" is not an offer.
Ask the first three for a photo. A customer's photo of your cake on their table is worth more than any of yours.
Go where the orders already are. School groups, neighborhood groups, your workplace, a church, a gym. One post in the right group beats ten posts into the void.
Make ordering one step. Every extra step — "DM me", "let me check", "I’ll send you my number" — loses people.
Be findable later. People decide weeks after they first see you. If your prices live in a story that expired, they cannot come back.

Then repeat deliberately: a short message to everyone who ordered once, before a holiday, is the cheapest marketing there is.

9. When it starts working

The signs are specific: you are turning down dates, you are baking three nights a week, and the admin takes longer than the baking.

What usually needs fixing first, in this order:

Your prices. If you are full at your current price, your price is too low. Raise it on new orders, honor the quoted ones.
Your menu. Cut the item you dread making. Someone else's favorite is not worth your Sunday.
Your limits. Decide how many orders a week you will take, and stop before the week decides for you.
Your state ceiling. Of the states covered here, four cap annual cottage food sales: New Jersey $50,000, Texas $150,000, Florida $250,000, and California on a figure re-indexed for inflation every year. Georgia, New York, Illinois and Arizona set no cap. North Carolina and Pennsylvania run inspection programs rather than capped exemptions, and state no ceiling either. If you are growing, find your own number on your state’s page before you reach it.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need a license to start a home bakery?

It depends entirely on your state, and the answers are genuinely opposite. Texas requires no permit and forbids inspections; Pennsylvania registers your kitchen for $35 a year and inspects it; North Carolina inspects before your first sale and has no cottage food exemption at all. Read your own state before anything else — we have a sourced page for each one, quoting the department or statute with the date it was checked.

How much does it cost to start a home bakery?

The legal side is usually the small part: nothing in Texas, $35 a year in Pennsylvania, up to $50 in Illinois, $100 for two years in New Jersey. The real costs are ingredients for your first batches, packaging, and any training certificate your state requires. The thing that decides whether you make money is not the start-up cost — it is whether your prices include your own hours.

What should I sell first?

Three to five items you can repeat on a bad week, that your state allows, and that survive a car journey. A short menu is easier to price, faster to shop for and gets better every time you make it. Add a sixth item when two different people have asked for it.

How do I price my baked goods?

Ingredients, plus packaging, plus your hours at a real hourly rate, plus overhead, plus profit. The mistake almost everyone makes is pricing the ingredients and forgetting the hours — and your time is the larger half. Our pricing calculator does the arithmetic in your browser and gives you a per-serving figure to sanity-check it against.

Can I sell my baked goods online?

In most states yes, but the conditions differ sharply and they decide how you operate. Pennsylvania includes internet sales in the registration. Illinois allows online sales and in-state shipping but requires a home-kitchen notice on the online sales interface at the point of sale. New Jersey allows online orders and payments but bans posting the food. Texas allows online selling only if you deliver it personally. Check your state page.

How do I get my first customers?

Tell people specifically that you are open — what you make, what it costs, how to order — and go where the orders already are: neighborhood groups, school groups, your workplace. Ask your first few customers for a photo. And make ordering one step: every extra step between wanting your cake and ordering it loses people.

Do I need a separate kitchen?

In most states no — the whole point of a cottage food law is that your home kitchen qualifies. But some states have specific conditions about the space: North Carolina does not count a garage, basement or separate building as home processing, and treats an indoor pet as a disqualifier. Your state page sets out what applies.

Other states

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