· By Kaley Hassell
How to Plan Your Bakery Menu & Production for a Farmers Market
One of the things I had to learn pretty quickly when we started doing markets was that deciding what to bring was only half the battle. You also have to figure out how much of each flavor to bring, how much total inventory makes sense for that particular event, what your potential sales look like, how much product you can realistically produce, and then somehow get all of that baked, labeled, packed, and ready without wanting to cry by Friday night. đ
I definitely did not have some beautiful system for this in the beginning. Like most things in our bakery, it came together over time through doing a LOT of markets, learning what sold, figuring out what absolutely did not need to be taking up valuable production time, and honestly just getting tired of making things harder on ourselves than they needed to be.
There is no exact formula I can give you for how many cookies you should bring to a farmers market because every location, event, customer base, and bakery is different. What I can share is how I thought through it after years of selling at markets, and the system that eventually helped me plan everything from the menu itself to how many kilos of sugar I needed to buy before production started.
Start with whatever information you can get about the market
If I was doing a market we had never sold at before, I would try to gather as much information as I reasonably could before deciding how much product to bring. If I knew someone who had sold there before, I would absolutely ask them how it went. If the event posted their vendor list, I would look at how many other bakeries or food vendors were going to be there. If they gave us a booth map, I would look at where we were placed and whether it looked like a heavily trafficked area.
I also paid a lot of attention to the expected traffic, how long the event was, and especially the weather. Weather can completely change an otherwise good market. If it was going to be brutally hot, rainy, windy, or just generally miserable outside, I would usually plan a little lighter because fewer people were going to want to come walk around outside for hours.
If I had sold at the market before, planning got much easier because I had history to work from. I could look at what we usually sold there and then think through whether anything was different that weekend. Was it a holiday weekend? Was the weather unusually nice? Was it a slower season? Was there another big event happening nearby? All of those little things helped me decide whether I wanted to increase or decrease what we normally brought.
For a new market, I personally preferred to bring enough product that the event felt worth doing, cover our fees, make money, and then be completely okay with selling out. Selling out was never something I was afraid of. When we sold out, we would actually leave our big cut-open cookie display up and put SOLD OUT signs in front of the flavors. People would still stop and ask what the heck they were, follow us online, take business cards, and come find us at another market because they had missed us at that one. I talk more about our exact display setup in my post about [how we displayed stuffed cookies to sell more], but the point is that running out of product did not mean the marketing opportunity was over.
I always built the menu around flavors I knew people loved
As much as I LOVE coming up with weird flavors, I learned very quickly that the crowd-pleasers carry a menu. Our chocolate chip cookie went to every single market. I never skipped it, and I always brought more of it than anything else because it consistently sold out no matter what else was on the menu.
Then I would almost always make sure I had something with Oreo, something with peanut butter, something with cookie butter or Biscoff, and something with Nutella. Those flavors are popular for a reason. People already know what they taste like, they already love them, and they donât have to think very hard before ordering one.
That didnât mean the actual cookies had to be boring. The Oreo cookie could have multiple types of Oreos, a cake filling, brownie batter, or whatever ridiculous thing I had decided to do that week. The cookie butter could be paired with banana bread. The Nutella could be stuffed into another cookie or paired with brownie. I could still be creative while giving people a flavor they immediately recognized.
I would always bring more of those crowd-pleasing flavors than I would bring of a brand-new or more adventurous flavor. People love seeing the crazy stuff, but a lot of people still walk up to a bakery booth and want chocolate chip, peanut butter, Oreo, or Nutella. Those are the flavors that are very hard to argue with.
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I still made plenty of weird things...I just didnât bet the whole market on them
This is probably where my creative side made my life harder than it needed to be, haha. I regularly brought around ten flavors to markets because creating was my favorite part of the bakery, and I genuinely loved giving our regulars something new to come look for. I would usually bring one or two flavors that were much more adventurous or completely new and use the market as a testing ground. If people lost their minds over it, great. If it was harder to sell, I learned something without having made six batches of it.
There are also certain flavors that are just more polarizing. Oatmeal raisin never sold like chocolate chip for us. Cherry can be very love-it-or-hate-it. Cranberry can be the same way. Mint or peppermint can be a hard no for some people. That didnât stop me from using those flavors, especially seasonally, but I usually planned smaller quantities when I knew I was working with something that not everyone would want.
I also tried to make sure the whole menu didnât lean too heavily in one direction. I didnât want everything to be loaded with chocolate because some people donât like chocolate and some people canât eat it. I liked having something lighter, something rich, something familiar, something seasonal, and something a little more adventurous. We almost always brought at least one gluten-free option, and sometimes we had a vegan or dairy-free option too. Our gluten-free cookies became really popular over time, so eventually that became something people actively came looking for rather than just an extra option we brought along.
Seasonality mattered too. In summer, I leaned more into fruit. In fall, I would bring fall spices and cozy flavors. Christmas obviously got Christmas flavors. I still liked keeping a few evergreen staples on the menu because chocolate chip and peanut butter do not suddenly stop being good because itâs December. I also usually tried to have a pretty even mix of drop cookies and stuffed cookies. That gave people different price points and different styles to choose from while keeping us very focused on one category, which ended up being one of the best decisions we ever made in our business.
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I planned around revenue just as much as I planned around cookie quantities
This was a huge part of how I eventually decided how much inventory to bring. Once I had a feel for what a particular market usually did for us, I found it much easier to plan toward a revenue goal than to arbitrarily decide how many cookies sounded like enough.
If we usually sold around $1,000 at a certain market, I would create my menu, start plugging in quantities, and watch the projected sales number. I almost always started with chocolate chip because I knew I wanted more of those than anything else. Then I would add the other crowd-pleasers, then the more creative flavors, and keep adjusting the quantities until the total inventory was somewhere around the sales goal I wanted.
For a really large event, that number could be much higher. If the booth fee was $600 and I knew it was a very busy event, I might decide I wanted to take enough product to do $5,000 or more in sales. That helped me think much more clearly about inventory because I wasnât just saying, âIâll bring 20 of this and 15 of that because that sounds good.â I could actually see what those quantities represented financially.
When we had multiple markets in the same weekend, I usually thought of the production as one large bake and then divided the finished inventory between locations. That made the production side much easier because I could see how many total batches I needed and then allocate the cookies to each market afterward. It also made packing much easier when other people were helping. If my employees were packing Phoenix while I was doing something else, they could literally look at the spreadsheet and know exactly how many of every single flavor needed to go into that marketâs tubs.
Want the spreadsheet I used to do this? đ
I turned the production-planning system I used in our bakery into a free Google Sheets planner. Plan your flavors, batches, quantities, projected sales, production days & more all in one place.
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Know what every batch actually yields
This is one of those little details that doesnât feel important until youâre making a ridiculous amount of cookies. Not every one of my recipes made the exact same number of cookies. One batch might make seven. Another might make eight. Another might make six depending on the size and how much filling or mix-ins were involved. When youâre making 175 batches of cookies in one production week, you need to know that.
If I wanted 32 chocolate chip cookies and that recipe yielded eight cookies per batch, I knew I needed four batches. If a different recipe yielded seven, that changed the math. I usually preferred to underestimate yield a little bit rather than assume I would get more than I actually did. If I thought a recipe would make six and it made seven, great. I had an extra cookie. That was a much easier problem than planning on eight and ending up short.
This is also why knowing your recipes well matters so much when you start selling at any kind of volume. The more predictable your yields are, the easier the entire week becomes to plan.
Figure out your ingredient needs before production starts
This became non-negotiable for me once our volume got high. As an example, for one of the market weeks I used when I was building the demo for my Bakery Production Planner, I was making 79 batches of cookies. I needed roughly 13.3 kilos of white sugar and 10.2 kilos of brown sugar just for the cookies. There is no version of that week where I wanted to be standing in Costco trying to mentally calculate how much sugar I needed. đ
Once I knew how many batches of each flavor I was making, I would calculate how much of the major ingredients I needed and plug those amounts into my spreadsheet. White sugar, brown sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and anything else we were going through in large quantities all mattered. Then I would think through the other components too. Were we making cakes for cake balls? Brownies? Toffee? Fillings? Toppings? Those ingredients needed to be accounted for because four batches of toffee can quietly use a LOT of butter.
I always gave myself some buffer too. If I calculated that I needed 13.3 kilos of sugar, I probably wanted 15 unless I already knew I had extra on hand. The last thing I wanted in the middle of a heavy production week was someone having to stop what they were doing and run to the store because we ran out of butter. Taking the extra time to think through the ingredients before production started saved us so much time and stress later in the week.
I eventually learned to work backward from market day
This part came from pain. đ Before we had a really good production system, Fridays could be AWFUL. It was so easy to think, âOh, I have plenty of time,â and let tasks slide toward the end of the week. Then before you knew it, we were still making labels in Canva, bagging cookies, writing signs, setting up Square, and trying to finish production at 2 or 3 in the morning while counting down how many hours of sleep we had left before market setup. That gets old very quickly.
Eventually I started planning backward from market day and intentionally front-loading the week. If we had a Saturday market, I wanted Friday to be as light as I could reasonably make it. Fillings and components were usually made earlier. Dough was often portioned on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday depending on how big the market was, then refrigerated in the dough boxes we used until it was ready to bake.
I also thought about the filling and how the finished cookie held up. A cookie with Nutella, cookie butter, a cake ball, or a Buckeye-style filling gave me more flexibility. A wetter filling, like some of my pumpkin fillings, could affect the cookie texture more over time, so I wanted to bake those closer to the event.
My ideal Friday was a few remaining cookie flavors to bake, followed by labeling, bagging, finishing signage, and getting everything organized to load. Wednesday and Thursday could be very long days, but I would rather work harder on Wednesday than be up at 3 a.m. Friday night knowing I had to wake up two hours later. That production planning alone made markets so much more enjoyable for us.
The non-baking tasks will sneak up on you
I think this is one of the biggest things newer bakers underestimate. You think market prep is mostly baking, and then suddenly you realize you need labels, a chalkboard menu, display cards, products loaded into Square, packaging ready, fillings made, signs printed, ingredient shopping done, and about 47 other random things.
In the beginning, we would tell ourselves, âWe can just do that at the market.â No. đ Because when you get to the market, vendors are already walking over asking if they can buy cookies, customers are coming up while youâre still setting the booth up, and now youâre trying to add products to Square while somebody is standing there ready to pay you.
Over time, I started putting every single one of those little tasks into the production plan. If I needed new labels for a flavor, that was a task. If I needed to update Square, that was a task. If the chalkboard needed to be written, that was a task. If I needed display cards for new cookies, that was a task. By the time we left for a market, I wanted to arrive knowing that all we had to do was set up and sell. That was a MUCH more enjoyable way to do business.
PUT YOUR WHOLE PRODUCTION WEEK IN ONE PLACE.
The free Bakery Production Planner includes batches, yields, ingredient needs, production days, prep & admin tasks, projected sales, and 1â6 setup planning.
Having the plan written down became even more valuable when other people helped
Once we had employees and multiple people working production, having everything in one place became an absolute lifesaver. I always think of it as having my brain on a piece of paper. If I was running around doing something else and my employees needed to know what fillings were supposed to be made that day, they could look at the spreadsheet. If my husband needed to pick up tubs for one market, somebody could pack them without calling me because the exact quantity of every flavor was already written down.
That kind of organization matters even if youâre working completely by yourself, but it becomes incredibly important once other people start helping you. You donât want every single decision in the business to require you standing there answering questions.
Honestly, that was one of the biggest reasons this kind of system helped my own brain so much too. I didnât wake up every morning looking at a giant mental list and wondering what I had forgotten. I knew what I had planned for Tuesday, and if I got Tuesdayâs work done, I knew I was in good shape. That gave me permission to stop working when the planned work was done instead of feeling like there was always something else I should be doing.
You do not have to wait until your bakery is huge to start planning this way
When I started my bakery, I started it because I liked baking. I did not start it because I was great at systems, protecting my sleep, organizing production, or thinking through how to make the business easier on myself. A lot of our systems came from doing things the painful way first and eventually thinking, âOkay, I do not want to live like this anymore.â
The spreadsheet I eventually used started as a simple list, and then over time I added how many batches I needed, recipe yields, market quantities, projected sales, ingredients, shopping, production days, and all of those little prep and admin tasks. It grew because I kept running into problems I did not want to solve twice.
Maybe youâre making seven batches right now, but that is still enough volume to get in the habit of planning. Know what youâre making, how many batches you need, what those batches yield, where the cookies are going, what ingredients you need to buy, and which day youâre doing each part. If your bakery grows, that system can grow right along with it.Â
There were weeks when we were producing $7,000 or more worth of cookies out of a relatively small operation, and I genuinely do not think we could have handled that volume well without planning it out. Having a system took so much of the thinking out of production because once the menu and the week were planned, we could just execute what was already there instead of constantly stopping to figure out what needed to happen next.
I eventually turned the market-week spreadsheet system I used in our bakery into a free Bakery Production Planner in Google Sheets. It has tabs for one through six setups, so you can use it for farmers markets, farmstand stocking days, pop-ups, preorder pickups, or whatever your bakery week looks like. You can plan your flavors, batches, yields, quantities, projected sales, production days, ingredient needs, shopping, prep tasks, and where each cookie is going all in one place. I also made a filled-out demo so you can see exactly how I would use it before you make your own copy.
I really hope it can save you some of the trial and error we went through building our systems over the years. I am SO grateful for everything God taught us through running our bakery, and getting to turn those lessons into something that might make another bakerâs life a little easier is one of my favorite parts of what I get to do now. âĽď¸