This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Did you start baking sourdough bread during the pandemic? Well, if so, you are not alone. My Instagram feed is filled with baking photos from people who never posted such things before. I'm like, oh, look at that person. Apparently they're a baker now.
Well, today's listener is one of those people who started baking while on lockdown and it led to her first side hustle selling at farmer's markets. She likes it so much now that she wants to do more of it. So what is the next step? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
I'm your host. Every day we're looking at different ways to make money apart from your day job. That's what it's all about using a skill you already have, or perhaps in this case using a skill you have recently acquired. Now food and beverage products in particular can be tricky to grow. There's a lot of complexity here.
So later in the month, I'll actually have a whole classroom episode specifically on this topic. But for now, let's consider the particular question of this listener, how to go from the farmer's market, perhaps to the grocery store or to somewhere else. Basically, what is the next step if you want to expand your food and beverage product? [Music]
Hey there, Chris. My name is Joe.
I'm from Iowa City and I've been listening to the show for a couple of years now. I'm still enjoying the puns. I started baking more during the pandemic and then I decided to try hosting a booth at my local farmer's market. I've been selling my vegan oat bars there for two months and the response is fantastic. I mean, everyone loves them and they're sold out every week.
Part of me likes the idea of ramping up and seeing how I can achieve more distribution, but I also have no real idea how to do that. I'm just a one person operation and don't have a budget to move to a commercial kitchen or hire anyone. How can I grow without over-investing? Looking forward to hearing from you, thanks. - Joe, what's up?
Thanks so much, man. I'm really glad to hear your message and yes, we do try to keep it fundamental around here, just baking care of business. Now I have not started baking much myself during this pandemic, but I have eaten a lot of delicious baked goods. I will say that I am trying to take one for the team. Fortunately, I've also been running more.
So it kind of offsets it. At least that's how I rationalize it. Now, as for scaling up, let's talk about these vegan oat bars. I'm actually working on a dedicated classroom episode specifically about growing a food and beverage or an F&B side hustle, because this industry really does present some unique challenges, at least compared to growing your app or your ebook or a lot of other things, even some other physical products because food and beverage, there's a lot more regulation. There's a safety issue and there's just like a freshness issue and how do you ship it?
How do you transport it? It's a lot more complexity. Doesn't mean it can't work. Of course, over the years, we have featured a number of people who have really done well. It's just one of those things that kind of goes from being really simple at a base level, like making those oat bars, taking them to the farmer's market to sell to a much increased level of complexity if you're trying to then move to a commercial kitchen or outsource to a co-packer who will follow your recipe to make the product in bulk.
And the thing is, like most people in this space, like if you are going to grow this kind of business, at a certain point, you do have to make a couple of key decisions about that because you can't just keep working harder all the time. In fact, a lot of people end up getting burned out. And I don't even mean that in a fundamental way. They actually just get really exhausted because they start to see initial success and then there's more demand for their product, just like Joe is saying his oat bars were sold out. And so they just try to keep doing more and more and you can't infinitely scale your own labor.
So if you don't wanna go that route, which of course is totally acceptable either way, couple of ideas if you don't wanna go that route. You might consider setting up a second booth at a different farmer's market, like in the same area, perhaps a bit further away, assuming there's more than one in your area and then maybe alternating between the two. So in one town, the farmer's market is on Wednesday and then the next town over, it's going to be on Thursday and they do that because a lot of the vendors overlap. You could also offer home delivery or perhaps pick up at your home if you're comfortable doing that, maybe one day a week or something. Maybe it's on Saturday afternoon or whatever space is not being taken with your day job and the farmer's market and anything else.
You could offer catering for offices and events as they slowly begin to come back. So there are some ways to expand without going down that route of exploring commercial kitchens and co-packers, et cetera. But at a certain point, you kind of have to make that decision. Like am I gonna go down a path of growth or just decide this is cool where it is right now? Or perhaps there could be a third path.
Like I'm all about the third path. Maybe the third path is this project inspires something else. Maybe Joe goes from saying, you know what? I didn't think I could ever do this thing at the farmer's market, but it's going really well. Maybe it's given me a totally different idea entirely.
So the choice is yours. Just be careful in trying to grow a food business and doing everything yourself because it will get pretty difficult pretty quickly. All right, lots of good stuff there, all inspired by Joe. Listeners, if you have a question of your own, you're going through something, try to figure it out, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. As you have heard, perhaps if you've been listening for a while, we are featuring them throughout 2020, maybe even beyond, we'll see.
I don't know, it's just lots of great questions coming in. So we'll be featuring them throughout the year and I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you are subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
