By Michael Eggebrecht — Artisan Baking Resources
A Life in Bakeries
I’ve been in bakeries for as long as I can remember. I grew up in one — the ninth Eggebrecht in a long line of bakers — where Saturdays started before dawn and the smell of donuts and pastries drifted down the street long before the sun came up. At eleven years old, I was working on the bench alongside my father; by twenty-one, I’d opened my first bakery on the other side of the country.
In my first bakery, I didn’t know anything other than what my father taught me. I soon learned that I needed to know how to make other products beyond what I grew up baking. I needed to know how to make bagels and sourdough breads — things I never made at my father’s bakery. This was before YouTube, so I had to turn to books and seek out other bakers who knew things I did not. Needless to say, I wasn’t prepared and had to learn the “trial by fire”way.
Those early years taught me that a bakery is more than ovens and recipes — it’s a living, breathing thing that shapes every part of your life, and will control your life if you are not careful. It taught me the value of planning. Every successful bake begins long before the dough hits the mixer, and every successful bakery begins long before the first loaf is sold.
Today, through Artisan Baking Resources, Inc and as a Representative for Empire Bakery Equipment, I help others design and size their bakeries the right way — combining efficiency, craftsmanship, and scalability.
This six-part series is a distillation of everything I’ve learned from decades in the trade: how to define your concept, choose your model, plan for production, and design a bakery that truly works.
Let’s start with the foundation — defining your bakery concept.
Step 1 — Identify Your Product Categories
Every bakery revolves around its products, and each product category drives entirely different requirements for space, workflow, and equipment.
I break the industry down into seven core categories: Bread, Pastry/Cookie, Viennoiserie, Pies, Cakes, Fine Desserts and Bagels.
Disclaimer:
This below matrix represents preferred or most common equipment choices, not strict limitations. In practice, bakers often adapt equipment for multiple uses — bread doughs can be mixed in a planetary mixer, and cakes can certainly be baked in a deck oven. The goal here is to highlight the setups most efficient and appropriate for each category in a professional production setting.
Understanding Bakery Workflows: Equipment and Temperature Zones by Product Type
Understanding the Bakery Workflow Matrix
This matrix illustrates how different bakery products overlap in their use of equipment and workspace environments. It’s a tool to help visualize where efficiencies can be found when producing multiple product lines under one roof.
For example, a bakery focused on artisan breads can often expand into bagel production with minimal changes—simply by adding a boiling kettle to the existing bread line. Similarly, fine pastry and cake production naturally complement each other, sharing much of the same equipment and temperature-controlled workspace, yet operating in a very different zone than bread or bagel production.
By comparing equipment and temperature requirements across categories, this chart highlights opportunities to streamline design, plan for shared resources, and build a more versatile bakery layout.
Choosing your core product category is usually easy. It’s often driven by passion and opportunity. For example, you may have a passion for naturally fermented breads (a.k.a. sourdough) and see an opportunity in your market that hasn’t been addressed. Say the local farmers’ market doesn’t have any good bread, and you think you can fill that niche. That assumption is probably correct — but can you make a business out of it?
The tricky part comes next. Are you going to just make bread, or are you going to add other categories?
A simple bread bakery could have fewer than 20 ingredients in the whole operation. But by adding Viennoiserie Pastry, you could easily add another dozen or more ingredients — and those might be costly items like chocolate, cheese, butter, and fruit.
Furthermore, by adding Viennoiserie Pastry you’ve also added another baking temperature zone. These fine pastries don’t bake at the same temperature as sourdough. In fact, they often don’t even bake in the same type of oven!
You see where I’m going with this. By simply adding a very popular product — and one that you could likely sell easily alongside your breads — you’ve now created additional costs in equipment, timing, and ingredients.
Remember: it’s always easier to expand an existing product line than it is to add a new product line. You can always add products within a category — for example, baguettes, ciabatta, and rye all fall under “Bread.”
But adding an entirely new category later (say, adding Cakes to a bread bakery) usually means major changes in ingredients, equipment, and layout that impact plumbing, electrical, and HVAC.
That’s why I always recommend that new bakeries start with no more than three categories — and ideally just one or two. Focus early energy on mastering your core products, refining systems, and building consistency. Growth should be earned by success, not assumed by ambition.
Step 2 — Choose the Type of Bakery You’re Building
Once you know what you’ll make, the next step is defining how you’ll sell it. There’s a world of difference between a retail bakery, a wholesale bakery, and a micro bakery.
Micro Bakery
The micro bakery model is nimble, compact, and often starts from a home-adjacent or small commercial space — or even your garage! You might bake for farmers’ markets, subscription programs, or a small café. Every square foot must do double duty.
The micro bakery is where many bakers start today, and for good reason. It’s a great place to test the market and find out what your customers like. It’s also a great place to prove to financial institutions that you’re serious and can turn a profit.
So many of the bakeries I help today start here. Getting funding isn’t easy in today’s environment but having a year in business that shows you have a great concept that’s profitable goes a long way toward getting financing.
The thing to keep in mind about home-based micro bakeries are that the health department food laws in your state will heavily dictate how you can sell your products. This will ultimately limit your sales in some way. A busy Farmers Market is often the main source of sales for these small bakeries. This might be fine for Southern States that have good weather most of the year but can be a big hurdle for Northern States where Farmer’s Markets are seasonal.
Retail Bakery
This is your neighborhood bakery — direct-to-customer, often with a café component. A retail bakery thrives on customer flow, display presentation, and front-of-house ambiance. Many operate as a blend of bakery, coffee house, and restaurant — roughly one-third of each. It’s not uncommon to see sandwiches, salads, and soups alongside a full-service espresso bar.
Retail bakeries typically employ a diverse team: skilled bread bakers and pastry chefs, trained baristas, and part-time counter staff. There’s a lot happening at once, and if systems aren’t carefully managed, the operation can spin out of control quickly. Success requires being both a skilled baker and a capable business manager.
One advantage of a retail bakery is immediate customer feedback — the smiles, compliments, and daily interactions that make the hard work feel worthwhile. But that energy comes at a cost. Retail bakeries can be expensive to open, especially today. Between building permits, health and safety regulations, inspections, and trade work for utilities and finishes, every department seems to want a piece of the budget before you can open your doors.
If you’re considering this type of bakery, work with an experienced consultant who understands the layout, workflow, and compliance challenges unique to retail operations. A good plan — and a few seasoned voices of experience — can save you thousands in mistakes and months of delays.
Wholesale Bakery
Wholesale baking is all about efficiency, consistency, and volume. You’re producing for cafés, grocery accounts, restaurants, or even your own satellite locations. In this environment, design revolves around production flow — clear paths for racks, pallets, and packaging, along with proper loading and delivery access.
Wholesale bakers usually love to bake — a lot — and take satisfaction in repetition and precision. The challenge isn’t just to make a great loaf once, but to make it exactly the same, day after day. Every bakery is a team sport, but in wholesale production, that teamwork is magnified. You’re running a coordinated plan each day — mixing, shaping, proofing, baking, cooling, and packaging — all in rhythm.
Beyond the bake shop, wholesale operations require an understanding of distribution, especially Direct Store Delivery (DSD). You’ll need to plan delivery routes, schedule drivers, and keep trucks maintained and running. It’s a complex system, and many new owners underestimate the time, cost, and management required to sustain it.
Wholesale bakers should also embrace automation and modern equipment. Skilled labor is harder to find than ever, and turnover remains high. Being a good baker today means producing consistent results while using dividers, rounders, and moulders to your advantage — not viewing them as shortcuts, but as tools that expand your reach and efficiency.
The right equipment allows skilled bakers to work smarter, not harder — and keeps production viable even as your workforce ages or changes. In many ways, automation doesn’t replace people; it empowers them to keep baking well into the future.
Each of these models can produce incredible results, but their requirements are entirely different — from the size of mixers to the kind of ovens, walk-ins, and packaging areas you’ll need. Knowing your model early helps every other decision fall into place.
Step 3 — Be Honest About Your Financial and Personal Goals
Before you commit to any design or lease, take a step back and ask yourself:
Are you trying to replace a six-figure salary right away, or are you content building slowly and sustainably?
If your goal is to earn a living from day one, you’re likely transitioning from another career — hopefully one that’s allowed you to set aside enough capital to launch properly. The old saying still holds true: it takes money to make money.You’ll need sufficient equipment and production capacity to reach the sales volume required to meet your income goals.
(We’ll dig into the “How Much Space Do I Need?” question in an upcoming article.)
Jumping into business and making money right away is possible — I’ve seen it happen. In the past few years, I’ve watched several bagel shops hit every mark: the right product, the right location, and the right viral buzz to be busy from day one.
But those early successes weren’t luck. They were built on preparation. To pull that off, you must have everything ready before opening: Employee manuals written and training completed. Your product line fully tested and consistent. Your equipment installed and workflow proven. Your brand story clear and visible and so many more.
When the doors open, you need to be ready to strike while the iron’s hot. Every customer who walks in should feel they just had the best darn bagel (or other baked good) they’ve ever eaten. That kind of momentum doesn’t happen by accident — it’s the reward for planning, honesty about your goals, and doing the work before opening day.
Is your goal to create a lifestyle centered around baking and see where it goes?
It might sound like an obvious question — because if you open a bakery, your life will revolve around baking. (If you haven’t already, read my article “Growing Up a Baker” for some perspective on that reality.)
But passion alone won’t build a business. You need to think through your strategy for going to market — how you’ll position yourself, reach customers, and build a following. A great product doesn’t sell itself; people have to discover it, connect with it, and keep coming back for more.
Every bakery owner needs to understand that opening a bakery means becoming an entrepreneur. You’re not just baking bread — you’re building a business. To succeed, you’ll need to become just as skilled at running that business as you are at crafting the product.
Most people start bakeries because they love baking — and that passion is a powerful foundation. But it can’t be your only driver. If your goal is to make a living and grow something sustainable, you must set clear financial targets and define what success looks like. Passion fuels the work; purpose and planning make it profitable.
Don’t open any business simply because you enjoy the work. Enjoyment keeps you inspired, but your bakery also needs direction, measurable goals, and structure. The moment you sign a lease or buy your first mixer, you’ve stepped into entrepreneurship — and that means managing costs, marketing effectively, and leading people.
That’s why I strongly recommend finding a good business attorney and a knowledgeable accountantearly on. They’ll help you structure your company, protect your assets, and monitor your financial health while you focus on production. You’ll sleep better knowing that while you’re in the bake shop at 4 a.m., someone else is watching the numbers.
How much capital do you realistically have to invest — and how much risk are you willing to carry?
That’s one of the toughest questions you’ll face, and it deserves an honest answer.
I’ve “bet it all” before — and while I’d still bet on myself any day, I don’t recommend betting everything. The problem isn’t confidence; it’s leaving yourself no room to adjust. When you put all your chips on the table, every assumption has to be right — from your product to your pricing, staffing, and location. And business rarely works that perfectly.
A smarter approach is to bet on the areas you’re sure of and hold some capital in reserve. Give yourself space to learn your market, tweak your product line, or adapt your operations once the doors open. If that means starting smaller, so be it — small and smart beats big and broke every time.
I like the old saying: “Only gamble what you’re willing to lose.” Every business involves risk, and bakeries are no exception. Around 20% of new bakeries fail in their first year, but that number drops dramatically for owners who take the time to learn, plan, and manage wisely. If you’re reading this, you’re already lowering that risk by doing your homework.
There’s no wrong answer here. But your comfort with risk — and the capital you have available — will shape the entire roadmap: your bakery size, your staffing, your equipment, and how quickly you can scale.
A Personal Note
When I talk about aligning goals with bakery size, I speak from experience.
During the height of COVID, when consulting work dried up and bakeries stopped investing in new equipment, I suddenly found myself without an income. So, I did what bakers do — I adapted. I opened a micro bakery in my garage, turning 750 square feet of space into a fully functional operation.
I didn’t have time to experiment or “see where it went” — I needed a full salary. Fortunately, I had decades of experience baking and designing bakeries, and I’d always dreamed of running a micro bakery. When sourdough started flying off the shelves and viral videos made artisan bread the star of the moment, I knew it was time to act.
Because I already knew how to size equipment properly and design efficient systems, I built the bakery to produce around 1,000 loaves per week in just three bake days. My area was filling up with educated bread lovers from neighboring states who were hungry for good sourdough, and the timing couldn’t have been better.
Within months, I had nearly replaced my previous salary. That wasn’t luck — it was planning. I built a bakery scaled exactly to my goals, my market, and my lifestyle.
I’ll share the full story — with all the details and numbers — in a future article. But that experience reinforced a truth I’ve seen play out time and again:
Success isn’t about building the biggest bakery possible — it’s about building the right-sized bakery for your goals, your market, and your life.
Looking Ahead
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll go beyond the concept stage and start looking at How to Choose the Right Space for Your Bakery.
We’ll talk about how to choose a space that truly fits your bakery — not the other way around. Is the space choosing you, or are you choosing the space? We’ll explore how to match your business model to the right kind of location, what to look for in utilities, access, and layout, and how to avoid the costly mistake of forcing your concept into the wrong building.
We’ll also begin connecting your equipment decisions to your goals and space — understanding how ovens, mixers, and refrigeration shape not only production capacity but also the physical footprint and future scalability of your bakery.
By the end of Part 2, you’ll have a clear roadmap for evaluating spaces, aligning them with your business goals, and selecting equipment that supports the bakery you’re building today — and the one you want to grow into tomorrow.
If you’re planning a bakery or considering expansion, I’d be happy to help you size your space and equipment properly.
At Artisan Baking Resources, we combine decades of baking experience with practical layout design and equipment expertise to help bakeries launch with confidence.