🎯 The business: bread, cookies, cakes or jams made in your own kitchen and sold directly to people, under the state’s cottage food law. Most states allow it with a simple registration and no commercial kitchen. It is the cheapest legal way into the food business.

Neighbors, farmers-market shoppers, offices, and anyone planning a birthday. Custom cakes bill $60 to $300, a dozen decorated cookies $40 to $80, sourdough loaves $8 to $14, holiday boxes whatever the season bears. The money is in custom orders and standing weekly customers, not in walk-up sales.

Read your state’s cottage food law twice: what you may sell (usually non-perishable baked goods), where (direct to the customer, sometimes online within the state), and the label rules. Pick three products and stop there. Bake for two neighborhood events and one office, with an order form in every box. Photograph everything in daylight.

A $12 sourdough loaf costs about $1.50 in ingredients and an hour of your time spread across a batch of eight. Thirty loaves a week plus two custom cakes is roughly $700 to $900 a week from a home oven. Most states cap annual cottage sales somewhere between $25,000 and unlimited; when you hit the cap, that is your signal for a commissary kitchen.

The cottage food law of your state (allowed foods, sales cap, label wording, where you may sell), a food handler card, and in some places a home kitchen inspection. No pets in the kitchen while you bake, in most states. Sales tax registration if your state taxes prepared food.

Underpricing, always. Burnout from forty-order holiday weeks in a home kitchen. An allergen complaint with no label to point to. And a bestseller that turns out to be perishable and therefore not allowed; check the list before you fall in love with a cheesecake.