I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Britain is going through what you might call a ‘bake off boom’ at the moment. Just look at all the baking and cooking related TV programmes there are. As well as a whole army of TV celebrity chefs showing us how to cook the best Yorkshire pudding or Victoria sponge.
It seems like there’s a massive and growing market here that’s ripe to be exploited… if you have the right ideas. So in this report I’m going to tell you about not just one but five different ways I’ve discovered that I think you could make money from bake off.
Don’t worry if you’re not all that good in the kitchen. With some of these projects you don’t need to do much actual cooking at all!
Cash In On The Cup Cake Craze
Cup cakes are surely one of the bake off boom areas of the last couple of years. But let’s be honest, they’re basically what we used to call ‘fairy cakes’… but fancier. They’re not going to call for much cooking skill. All you really need to get started are some good, original designs – think of colours, flavours and toppings you could use to make a really unique product.
Designing & Baking Celebration Cakes
This one could be for you if you have some baking skills, specifically cake making. You can upscale your products from simple cup cakes to something more sophisticated (and drastically upscale your profits).
The best way to run this opp would be to create and bake bespoke cakes to the customer’s own requirements.
Home Based Sandwich Delivery Service
If you can’t bake to save your life, how about setting up a sandwich round? Sandwiches can’t be described as cooking in any way, shape or form! Also, sandwiches are another high added value product where the selling price is out of all proportion to the cost of the ingredients.
Draw up a menu and circulate it to offices, factories and other places of work in your area. Take orders by phone or email, make them up and deliver them in time for lunch. You might also be able to get shops to stock your sandwiches on commission.
Lunch, Dinner & Party Catering
Eating in is the new eating out apparently! If you’re a more accomplished cook you could upscale your cookery business and do outside catering for lunches, dinners and parties. This could go really well at the moment, as fewer people want to blow a couple of hundred quid in a fancy restaurant.
Draw up some sample menus for customers to choose, which will mean you can do a lot of preparation in advance and make everything easier.
Sourcing & Selling Local Produce
Local produce has become big news over the last couple of years. Not only does it appeal to consumers looking for unique and interesting food choices rather than bland, factory produced ones – it cuts down on the environmentally unfriendly food miles needed to transport goods from the other side of the world.
There are lots of examples of how local food products are marketed and sold nationwide successfully. Here are just a few I know of: Stilton cheese. Melton Mowbray pork pies. Grasmere gingerbread. Arbroath smokies. Whitstable oysters. Jersey Royal potatoes. Yorkshire forced rhubarb. Cumberland sausage. Cornish pasties.
What currently little-known products from your local area could you make or source and sell to a wider audience?