What do I want to be when I grow up?

At 18 years old, I wish I knew what I know now—I love to bake, and I love to cook, and I'm very interested in nutrition. Had I known that back then, my life would have taken a completely different path. Having said that, I'm very happy with the path it took, as I have had great work experiences, saw love fail, and saw love soar, and without the path I've been on, I would have never met my husband or had my beautiful daughter. I wish that life allowed us a do-over so I could go back to school—culinary school, to be specific—and continue to learn more and more about the topics that really interest me at this point in my life. But going back to school isn't in the cards for me, so I self-teach.

Remember in my last post back in November, I had a lot of homework to do to figure out if I can make a living selling my products wholesale. Well, I think I've completed steps 1, 2, and 3, and I now have to focus on step 4: finding customers that want to buy my product.

In my calculations (you can't believe how much number crunching I've done over the last few weeks), I've determined that in order to be able to make a living doing this, I need to be able to sell, EVERY DAY, five days a week, the following amount of goodies:

-125 packs of cookies

-2 breakfast breads (pound cakes)

-24 muffins

-2 apple pies

-6 apple happyjacks

Every day. With proper equipment and my own commercial kitchen, I can definitely produce this amount each day, but can I sell this much each day? I don't know. My next step is to create a nice little leave-behind flyer/brochure, make some samples, and hit the road. I need to create a list of places to target: coffee shops, local delis, grocery stores, etc. And then I need to visit them, convince them to buy my product, and see how much they would order on a regular basis. The hard part is this: I can't commit to anyone until I know I have enough commitments to make it work. How do you walk into a place to get a commitment when you don't even know if you can commit? How do I sell that? I also need to figure out shelf life of all of my cookies, so that will require some baking and testing over the course of a week or so. That should be fun for my husband.

So I have some questions for you, my followers:

Do you know anyone that owns an establishment that might be interested in selling my product? 

Do you have any suggestions on how to sell my story to potential customers? Do I play the "little guy trying to get a break" card? What would convince you to take a chance on me, aside from the deliciousness that is my product?  :)


Hopefully I have more tell you about in another month or two. The farmer's market will be starting up in June. I'm very much looking forward to seeing everyone again.


Until next time, have a yummy day!