Something rather nice happened this week — all 24 subscription slots are now taken. Twelve on Tuesday, twelve on Friday, all gone. Quietly chuffed, if I'm honest, and very grateful to every one of you. 🙏
I thought I'd use this opportunity to give you all an insight into what a bake day at Jack's Bread looks like right now and then reflect on where we might take things next.
What a bake day actually looks like
- 15 min Starter prep — feeding and checking the levain, reading its mood for the day. Always done the day before.
- 60 min Mixing — mixing the dough in 4 separate batches (Kenwood bowl capacity of 5 litres limits me to 3kg of dough at a time).
- 45 min Stretch & folds — building strength in the dough over multiple passes. I need to do this roughly every 30 minutes for 2.5 hours.
- 45 min Shaping — each loaf shaped individually by hand.
- 3 hrs Baking — four loaves at a time in a domestic oven, across 3 separate batches. The oven simply can't fit more. Yes, that means a lot of waiting. And duet to hotspots the bread needs to be moved shelves a few times, so I can't leave it unattended long.
- 30 min Cleaning — self-explanatory!
- 30 min Admin — orders, messages, scheduling, the business side of bread.
- 15 min Packaging — wrapping each loaf with care before it goes out the door.
Total per batch of 12: 7 hours
That works out at an hourly rate of...
£8.57/hr 😅
Less than minimum wage. Don't tell my accountant.
And that's revenue — it doesn't even include my costs (equipment, energy, ingredients etc.). Oh well. I didn't expect to be getting rich at this point in the business. 😂
⚠️ The two big bottlenecks
- 🥣 Mixing — done in 4 separate batches because one bowl can only hold so much dough. A single larger mixer could cut this dramatically.
- 🔥 Baking — 3 rounds through a domestic oven, 4 loaves at a time. A second oven, or a bigger one, would transform the whole operation.
And remember, currently everything is done in a domestic kitchen. It was obviously an easy way to get started, but it's also reaching its natural limit.
To make more bread, something has to change — and I'm genuinely not sure what the right next step is — so here's the options I'm thinking over:
- 📅 Bake more days per week — no new kit needed, but it starts eating into home life
- 🥣 Bigger batches each bake day — buy a proper mixer and a second oven and double or triple output without extra days
- 🏠 Move into a garage — mine or someone else's — dedicated space, proper setup, still low cost
- 🏭 Rent a (shared?) commercial kitchen — more capacity, but a bigger commitment
The obvious one to me is buying new equipment and moving into my garage. This would cost around £3,000 all in and would probably triple my capacity. At my current rate of 24 loaves pw that would take me a long time to break even, but of course I would be increasing production - let's say 3x for sake of argument so I'd be doing approx. 72 loaves pw. The AI recons that I would break even after 3 months.
One of the big questions is demand - could I actually get 72 subscribers? Well, it seems there are certainly more than 24 people who want a bread subscription, but that doesn't mean there are 72!
One option is to increase capacity to 3 days per week for a trial period to see if I can get another 12 subscribers, and based on how difficult that is, use that to determine the likelihood I can get to 72.
Of course, in business you often don't know the answer to things until you try them - and that's rather the whole point isn't it? No risk, no reward!
🤖 A slight tangent...
One other relevant thing to mention is my mind has been turning increasingly to the AI goldrush that is happening right now. What has that got to do with bread you might ask? Well, not many of you will know, but in my past life I was software engineer. I moved into management eventually as I got rather bored of coding. But new developments in AI mean it's easier than ever to build software, and it seems silly to ignore the opportunity. Yet I have no desire to return to the corporate life and am quite happy as a part-time baker.
But I had an epiphany the other day - how about I build my own micro bakery platform? That way I can keep my head entirely in the domain of baking, whilst not missing out on the AI goldrush. While my current online shop runs of Shopify, which is "fine", it has required me to implement an endless number of hacks to make the subscription model work well. And on top of that they take a 7% cut! So not only could I avoid that, but I could also potentially sell my solution to other micro bakers around the world. So, watch this space. The way you subscribe to bread may be changing over the coming months.
Anyway, that was me just thinking aloud really — if anyone has thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them. Thanks for being part of Jack's Bread so far. Every loaf is still made the same way it always has been, and that's not changing. 🧡