Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?

[idontwantthis]

Hoping someone can tell me about what it takes to become a professional baker.

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

What is the job market like?

Do you consider it a good career?

[JackMorgan]

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.

[tmm]

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?

[makeitdouble]

I’ve been only on the customer side but can concur.

We were buying “fancy” bread and cakes a lot at a nearby bakeries, but clearly the bulk of the customers and sales where kids on their way from school to home, and people buying bread for the dinner and next morning.

Of course quality mattered to a point, but I don’t think it made a difference wether it was 70% good instead of 99% good.

At a point we were waiting the croissants at a store that was won the best award that year, and behind us the local residents were pretty bitchy about having to wait 5min for the next batch, and ended up going to another store farther from there.

[js2]

> Also they often didn't even like "fancy" bread, and would complain about anything different from just regular sliced grocery store foam.

Great Harvest seems to do well enough. The one in my area is always busy. They have a FAQ for potential franchisees:

https://www.greatharvest.com/franchise/open-a-bakery-franchi...

[CommanderData]

Are Soft Pretzels in the bread or cake category? I.e the type from Auntie Anne's.

Anyone know how are the margins with a Pretzel stand / your typical Auntie Anne's?

[beepbooptheory]

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

[zengargoyle]

Ditto. But eh... My bagel place was large enough to be industrial park warehouse sized and served the state of New Mexico with outlet shops and probably the bagels you find in the bulk bins at the grocery stores. They hired anybody breathing. It's a fun hacker story.

I applied and they told me I was overqualified so I played the "starving actor" card. I do computers and stuff but need a blah blah job to pay the rent. Bagels on that mid-industrial scale are more assembly line like engineering. Cut the dough, feed it into the former, put it on a tray, freeze or proof and bake, coat with things if needed, fill boxes... it's more of just a process.

A few weeks later the boss comes out for like the third time for a gripe session complaining about all of the wastage happening during the proofing process. Engineer brain piped up and blurted out "your doing it wrong". Gah! do it this way. The boss turns to the floor manager and promptly sends him out shopping for a list of items and the next day my procedure was implemented and all was well. A week later the boss calls me into the office with the owners. They can't do much but slip me a goodly amount of cash under the table.

Not to long after I was the mix-master coming in at 3am with the boss to get the work started and prepare the days production run and we'd bash out a significant amount of product in the couple of hours that it took for the rest of the workers to come in for their shifts. Then he'd go to the office and I'd just mix up new batches of dough or go make some boxes.

Pretty much walked out every day with enough bagels to fill myself and my housemates.

I would agree in the end, that sort of "baker" is pretty much dead end. There aren't really advancement positions much beyond mix-master or floor manager, it's a sparse field.

I actually found "baker" trivially easy compared to Dev/CS work. Same with "residential dining" or "warehouse management". If it's large enough it's just another procedure/process problem that you can hack into shape just like programming.

[schwartzworld]

> the debt is relatively small compared to regular college,

Unfortunately the pay is also relatively small when compared with the kind of jobs a college graduate might apply for. It's not bad once you get your own kitchen, but I've known some very skilled cooks who started at $10 an hour at their restaurants. Culinary degree and all

[thorin]

That sounds most accurate, read Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential for more detail :-)

[bar_de]

Not a baker but very close to one.

Bakery is learned as apprenticeship in my home, i.e. 50% school with other young bakers and the other half in the bakery which took you in. This is a very classical education type for trades called "Ausbildung". It takes 3 years and afterwards you can work or become a master/"Meister" which takes two more years. A Meister extends his knowledge and some years ago it was mandatory by law to have finished your Meister to open your own business. Personally this is a very good way to learn professional crafts and you even get payed for it - even when in school.

The job market is not so nice as there are mainly bakery chains which don't even hire bakers by education primarily due to higher labor costs.

However, there are some bakers who create their own small shops where they do everything by hand in contrast to the prefabricated and highly optimized bakery chains. The small shops make traditional bread, and you can taste it. Your stomach and digestive system will probably like it, too.

Yes, it is a good career if you dare and risk opening your own store. You will attract people by the quality of your product who will, in exchange, not only become loyal customers but being the supplier for bread in Germany is a highly valued profession - an institution.

Good people get help by other good people. This is basic human law. I feel having a platonic relationship with the baker I know and he never has IT problems for long. :)

[MegaDeKay]

> but being the supplier for bread in Germany is a highly valued profession - an institution

You are making a good point here. Different countries will value quality bread and other types of baking much more than others.

[Ayesh]

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.

[johnwheeler]

A cake and 2 dozen brownies a day to make rent eh? What’s in them brownies?

[emacsen]

My family owned and operated a full service bakery. That means they did everything from breads, to cookies, to cakes, to weddings and special orders, as well as seasonal favorites.

Being a baker is hard. Your staff has to be there nearly all the time prepping, proofing, baking, selling, you're competing with not only supermarkets but also operations like Costco/Sam's Club which can produce high quality baked goods at very low prices, etc.

Also remember that your operation is like a factory where you're always dealing with storing supplies, which expire in a matter of weeks sometimes, and then your produced goods expire in a matter of days.

Also, you'll be dealing with customers whose only experience is supermarket bread, which doesn't go stale, doesn't mold, etc. and they will think your product is inferior if it does.

I think things have changed since when I was a kid in the 80s, but if I were to start a bakery now, I'd be thinking about niche products- focus on a tiny market segment, specific to specific groups- health conscious, gluten free, specialty flavors or some other segment that is going to be willing to pay for a premium product. Do not try to compete on price.

I'd be thinking about marketing heavily, and I'd think about creative outlets for both producing and selling.

For example, maybe sell at a farmer's market instead of a storefront. For production, rent a commercial kitchen instead of fronting the money for making equipment, selling online or subscriptions as well. Basically cut your costs as much as possible while you do your proof of concept.

[mbfg]

I don't doubt for a minute that being a small bakery business is super hard, and competing against supermarkets etc is frustrating, but i don't think it's because the quality is the same. Supermarket cakes, etc, are absolute trash. I don't know any of them that use butter, which makes their cakes taste awful.

The problem is, people just don't have the time or energy to go to separate bakeries, or don't have the mindset to do so. also if you bake a good cake there's likely no way you can compete with supermarket prices.

So there's no doubt in my mind you can easily out compete supermarkets on quality, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter.

[test001only]

Curious, why doesn't supermarket bread go stale as quick as bakery bread? Is it because they use some sort of preservative (I could not find anything obvious in the ingredients list)?

[jamil7]

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.

[senectus1]

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...)

[mhb]

A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker

https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/2018/11/19/ll...

[i_am_proteus]

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.

[phonypc]

This seems backwards.

The flour (say 500 grams) for a basic loaf of bread should cost something like 50 cents, looking at U.S. prices. Water, yeast and salt a fraction of a cent each. You should be able to charge at least $3 for the resulting loaf. If you know what you're doing and are in the right area, maybe as much as $6? 6-12x markup over ingredient cost.

The same bread ingredients would make the dough for a rather large pepperoni pizza, which you could maybe charge $20 for? A very conservative (I think) $2.50 of cheese and $1 of pepperoni would leave you at a 5x markup. Never mind tomato sauce, or the extra labour involved.

[throwawaycuriou]

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.

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.

[ckdarby]

Have a friend who worked a year at a one star restaurant making basically minimum wage but then left to do private cooking/private dining. Cleared $200k last year.

[jmpman]

Not a baker, but a local bakery popped up recently in Phoenix. It’s a high end French patisserie, easily equalling anything I’ve had in Paris.

The baker comes from Switzerland where he was previously a banker. He has no formal baking training, and yet produces the highest quality products.

Although the demand for high end French pastries is relatively low in Phoenix (there is no competition), he’s found a core customer base that clears him out every Saturday.

www.labelleviebakery.com/

In a large enough metropolitan area, his formula could be replicated with great success.

[ksec]

This. ( Not a baker but used to work in commodity trading and Food sector )

Which is in response to the first comment. You cant compete on commodity. And you really shouldn't be. Doesn't matter which market it is you are always going to lose to economy of scale, i.e Grocery Store. You have to compete on specialty. I believe high end French patisserie is a market of massive growth. Unfortunately these type of business are unattractive to VC.

[makach]

My gf's uncle is a well know baker. Workaholic. Works all night, sleeps a little during the day. It's hard physical work that requires a lot of skills and experience. If it is your passion, make it your career. Don't do the same mistake as I did and make your hobby your career. God luck!

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Interesting, I interpret "passion" as "my favorite hobby", hobby being something I'm interested in that is not my day job (school being the job when a kid)

[senorsmile]

My wife went to CIA and is starting a local gluten free bakery while I keep the full time tech job and help out here and there.

We are starting very slowly; almost entirely word of mouth for now. We intend to build our base slowly.

There is certainly demand for gluten free baked goods. We will hopefully be able to hire someone soon.

[yial]

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.

[Finnucane]

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.

[mcaravey]

I currently own and run a bakery. We sell breads and pastries, and generally avoid anything custom, such as fancy cakes. We have things figured out enough that we’ll hire people with no experience on the spot and train them up. We start by having them work the table, meaning they shape the dough into the final products. Its fairly safe, and as long as there is supervision its not usually hard. From there they can pick where they want to train next, be it mixing, ovens, or something else.

As for my own training, I did not have any schooling or apprenticeship. What helped me was to hire someone with experience. The baker we hired didn’t have a grasp of fundamentals (why certain things are done), but he knew enough of the mechanics to get us going. I spent a lot of time reading, researching, and learning the underlying science of things. Also I was just crazy enough to make large changes in production with minimal testing until things worked. Changes such as swapping out starter types in a dough…

As for the job market: we are having an extremely hard time finding people. In Oregon minimum wage is $14/hour but you can drive for Amazon for over $20. Trying to strike a balance with labor costs and product costs has been very difficult, especially with Covid. Last time I priced out ingredients, a baguette cost less than $0.15, but the rest of the cost is 100% people. So we spent a ton of time getting less people involved. Today we can comfortably bake about 1000lbs of dough with one person mixing, two on the tables, and one on the ovens.

One essential part of our operations is the custom software I wrote for managing the production floor. We track orders for customers in the software and on the day for baking the mixer just uses the iPad for how much dough to make, how much batter to mix, and how much of each ingredient to weigh. Then the shapers see a list of what breads to make out of each dough, and then the bakers get to see what should be baked. Because the software automatically calculates all the quantities, the production process is MUCH less mentally challenging and basically runs on autopilot. We are looking to actually cleanup and resell the software to bakeries.

And finally, is it a good career? Depends a lot. We only have one location, so as a baker there’s only so much you can climb up the ladder. If you really wanted to make a good career you’ll need to learn all the jobs and learn them well. Then make your way into management with all the knowledge you now have. If you really wanted to climb, you’ll jump over to a large company or one thats looking to become large. Be aware that large bakeries are very different in many ways from small operations. Our bakery is looking to grow a lot, and we need people to make it happen. We are projecting to open a second production facility in a few years, and we would be looking to hire all sorts of positions, including shift managers, general production managers, and there would likely also be a production manager over both facilities. The downside is that if you’re in it because you enjoy touching the products, then too high up the management ladder you climb, the less that’ll happen.

With all that said, it’s extremely hard to own a bakery, especially starting out. The capital expenditure is huge. Yes, the margins you get are pretty good. We are hovering around a 50% gross margin now which is great, but we need to increase the volume of product we move. I still write a ton of code for my other startup that we are trying to launch soon (finance, not baking). I personally enjoy baking a lot, but I have waaaay more skill with the computer, so I’m stuck balancing where to spend my hours in the day. Becoming a baker depends a lot on what you want to do with yourself.

[interioroutflow]

I am currently one month in to learning on the job as a baker. I can’t speak for the job market, but I can say that working at this job has given me a new perspective on restaurants, bakeries and food. It gives me lots of ideas for opportunity and innovation related to my previous career / school experiences. I don’t think I plan on being a baker long term, but I find the work itself to be really gratifying so I might change my tune! It’s rewarding to see so many people immediately enjoy & be nourished by something I’ve made. Once I got the hang of things the repetitive processes have been a relatively easy way to feel a flow state. It’s also cool to create something I didn’t think I was capable of making a couple of weeks ago. I am working part time and highly recommend at least trying a part time baking gig at a place that’s willing to train you on the job. Thanks for the reason to reflect!

[somberi]

I enjoyed this article in The New Yorker (Apr 13 2020 issue), where the author talks about his boulangerie apprenticeship in Lyon, France. Parts of it were beautifully written for my taste.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/baking-bread-i...

[sushsjsuauahab]

Knew a guy who ran bread ops at a normal bakery. He slept poorly and eventually quit because lifting was hurting his back..