This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings and hello. Welcome back. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. Fun story for you today.
Now we have talked before a couple of times about people with specialized diets or people who are just health conscious or have specific preferences. And if you fit any of those profiles yourself, you probably know that you have to buy specialized food products. You have to be diligent to make sure you're safe and healthy or are following the lifestyle that you've chosen. So naturally this leads to a lot of side hustles or potential side hustles. Gonna tell you about one today.
It's all about a healthcare analyst who moonlights as a baker, earning several thousand dollars a month in additional income. And as part of this, you're gonna learn something that was completely new to me. This is about a process, a whole industry in fact, called co-packing, where if you have a recipe, if you have a food product you want to make, but you don't wanna actually make all of it yourself, there are companies in just about every major city that will do this for you. As I said, I didn't know how this worked until I started researching the story. So I look forward to bringing that to you right after this.
[Music]
By day, Adrienne Smith is a healthcare fraud analyst. By night, she operates Healthier Baked Goods Manufacturing, which provides traditional sugar-free, no sugar added, and a soon to launch gluten-free line of specialty desserts. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adrienne has always enjoyed baking, but it was a change in her household habits that led to the development of what is now a very stable second income. You see, a few years ago, her husband received a diagnosis that changed both of their lives. He learned that he was allergic to high fructose corn syrup, which at least in America is used as a sweetener in a lot of different foods.
Way too many and way too much in the opinion of many experts, but that's a story for another day. For the purposes of our story, Adrienne's husband had a sweet tooth, and this diagnosis meant he could no longer eat some of his favorite desserts, including the cheesecake he loved. He also couldn't eat packaged cookies or candy or even a lot of breads. Adrienne now says that this diagnosis was the best thing that could have happened to them. It created positive change and a much healthier lifestyle in her household.
However, at the time, she had to resolve the crisis of the missing cheesecake. She began to bake by subtracting sugar from different recipes and replacing it with sugar substitutes that turned out to be much healthier. Fortunately, Adrienne is creative by nature and the experimentation produced stellar results. Pretty soon she was baking cakes, cookies, pies, and muffins that not only tasted great, they were also actually healthy. While continuing to work her full-time job, Adrienne started taking cakes to events at work, family gatherings like cookouts and dinners, and to church and community functions.
People who tried them mentioned that they even tasted better than traditional desserts with sugar or corn syrup. Adrienne had had a bit of experience in the world of side hustling. She had previously made and sold floral arrangements. She took her wreaths and centerpieces to farmer's markets and specialty stores. It wasn't a large business, but it taught her an important lesson on the value of getting one thing right instead of trying to do it all.
So from that experience, she had a bit of knowledge. She now had this skill of making delicious sugar-free desserts, and she had a great origin story of how this had started. But then she came upon a challenge. The challenge wasn't getting her cakes and pies into the first few shops. She was able to do that almost right away based on existing connections and relationships she had.
Within a few months, she was selling a few dozen cakes and pies each week. So that was great, but what was difficult was time management and the small matter of scale. Baking for church functions or even a couple of small shops was totally manageable from her home kitchen and by herself, but beyond that, she would have either had to decline potential orders or be constantly frazzled trying to fulfill everything. As the demand increased, she realized that she did not have the ability to bake everything from her kitchen, and it was also increasingly difficult to work full-time while she was juggling this side hustle. So what did she do?
Did she quit her job and jump full-on into the world of sugar-free coconut cream pie? She did not. Did she give up on the hustle because it was too much work and she didn't know how to grow it? She did not do that either. Instead, Adrienne got smart and she learned about co-packing.
Now, if you know all about co-packing, you're way ahead of me. I had to read up on this and do some research. Co-packing is the outsourcing of the food production business. And a co-packer is a company that will take your recipe and then bake your product to your specifications in the quantity you need. And then you get a chance to approve a sample product to make sure everything is exactly the way you want it.
Adrienne hired a co-packer to replicate her recipes so that she was no longer baking most of the existing items, just new recipes, experiments, and special orders. And once her time was free up to think more about sales, the project grew. Whole Foods began to stock her products in several stores and that led to other opportunities. Based on these successes, she was able to visit other stores and make a short pitch complete with an in-person tasting. She also learned that a no did not always mean a permanent no.
She once gave a presentation to a market where the store owner seemed cold and indifferent and she didn't get the sale. But as she was getting ready to walk away, she told that store owner that she would check back in the fall acknowledging that the current timing might not have been best to introduce her product line at that store. Six months later, she returned and that owner said he really wanted to sell half-bunt cakes. No problem, she said. The market then became a regular customer.
This sugar substituting project now brings in about $6,000 a month. And Adrienne expects this number to grow as she expands. Because the co-packer is doing all the baking, it's actually easy to expand. Because as she increases her sales, she does a bit more work, but not a lot. The initial startup costs were also very low, just $200 to $300.
And that was because she intentionally started with only the basics and needed very little equipment outside of what was already in her kitchen. She began to call it Adrienne's classic desserts, more on that in just a moment. And she's adding a line of gluten-free goods for people with celiac disease or just customers who prefer that option. Her ultimate goal is to grow the business to the point where if she chooses to, she'll be able to walk away from her full-time job. As her tagline says, on the box of every delicious, yet sugar-free dessert she makes, healthier, never tasted so good.
[Music]
So let's talk about co-packers. Since that was totally new to me, I have done a lot of different projects in my side hustling life, but I have never made a food product, which is probably a good thing since it would be terrible. But it was interesting to learn how this process works. Now, the natural question is, where do you find such a company, if you're interested in pursuing this model? Well, I just started looking around, and I chose two cities, my hometown of Portland, Oregon and Toronto, Canada.
And just a quick Google search showed me at least eight co-packers in Portland, including the Bohemian Kitchen, Happy Campers Gluten Free and Commercial Commissary Kitchen. And I think they were at least 13 in Toronto. Now, it probably is the case that maybe only one or two of those would work for any particular recipe or product, because they tend to specialize. But if this is your goal, it doesn't seem terribly difficult to find a source. And then, as Adrienne has done, you can focus on growing your hustle instead of just operating it.
I also thought it was interesting that Adrienne changed her name, well, not her name, but the name of the project. The legal name was Healthier Baked Goods Manufacturing. And then at some point in the process, she decided to call it Adrienne's Classic Desserts. And if you just think about it, Classic Desserts sounds a lot better than Healthier Baked Goods. And the name adds some personalization to it as well.
So sometimes there are cafes or food producers that are exclusively vegan or gluten-free or both or whatever. And they can have an interesting way of marketing because they have a way of reaching those people, like people who identify with those diets or lifestyles, but they don't do it in a way that's super obvious to everyone else. And that's because they're trying to draw in other people as well. They don't want someone who's not vegan or gluten-free to see a sign and think, "Oh, that's not for me," or, "I don't want that." And Adrienne's Classic Desserts seems aligned with that model. So I thought that was pretty cool.
Congratulations, Adrienne. Cytosool School listeners, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/136. You can learn about that delicious sugar-free cheesecake. You can also learn about co-packing.
And by the way, a quick heads up, we are working on something fun to involve not only more listener questions, but also listener stories, tips, feedback, and suggestions for other listeners. This is in the works, and I'll have something more to say about it at the end of this week. Just wanted to mention it now because I know a lot of people have something to share or contribute. This is at the top of our priorities list as we continue to improve the show. With that, I'm Chris Guillebeau.
This is Cytosool School, and I hope to see you tomorrow.
