Contributed by Dawn-Marie Nesbitt | founder | The Digital Bakery Model
KANSAS CITY, MO — For bakery owners looking to share their expertise, teaching in-person classes often feels like the natural next step. After all, if customers love a bakery’s sourdough, pastries or signature cakes, why not invite them into the kitchen to learn how they’re made?
Classes can build relationships, strengthen the brand experience and generate additional revenue. But they require scheduling, preparation, facilities and someone to deliver them. Attendance can also be limited by location and capacity.
For bakeries looking to extend their brand experience, or industry professionals wanting to earn from their skills, there are other ways to share knowledge without offering classes.
Step 1 | Start with what people already want to know
Knowledge-based digital products can take many forms. A bakery might sell a downloadable collection of its most requested recipes, a recorded tutorial demonstrating a specialist technique or a guide to making artisan bread at home.
Opportunities extend beyond baking techniques. Someone with bakery management experience could create a pricing spreadsheet or a production planning guide to reducing ingredient waste.
Before creating anything, it’s important to establish what people actually want to learn. A useful starting point is the questions people already ask.
Perhaps customers regularly request a bakery’s signature cookie recipe. Other bakers might want to know how to achieve the right texture of a particular pastry. Bakery owners might ask how to calculate prices or manage production.
These questions reveal where valuable knowledge already exists and provide clues about what people might be willing to pay for.
After receiving repeated questions from other bakery owners about how she and her sister built and ran Spilt Milk Pastry in Chicago, Meg Svec, former co-owner, launched Bakery Business Academy in 2019.
Through online courses and resources, Meg shares the practical business knowledge she gained as a successful bakery owner, including pricing, financial management and bakery operations. The opportunity grew from something other bakery owners were already asking about.
Rather than creating another physical bakery product, Svec recognized her experience running a retail bakery could also help other business owners and serve as a separate source of revenue.
Step 2 | Match the question with the knowledge and format
Once a baker identifies what people want to know, the next step is to consider three things:
– What are people asking for?
– What knowledge is available to answer that question?
– What’s the simplest format for sharing it?
If customers want to recreate a bakery’s cinnamon rolls at home, a downloadable recipe guide with photographs might be enough.
If other bakers struggle with a certain decorating technique, a short video tutorial may be more useful than an elaborate course. And if bakery owners need help calculating product costs, a simple app could solve that problem without months of software development.
The goal is to create the smallest, most useful product that delivers the intended result without a significant investment of time or money.
Starting small also allows the creator to test demand before scaling up.
Sarah Grunewald, owner of Sarah’s Sourdough in Tulsa, OK, created a $20 beginner’s sourdough e-book that has generated approximately $13,000 in sales. She’s also developing a more comprehensive recorded workshop that teaches cottage bakers how to host their own sourdough classes. The idea was inspired after other bakers asked about her workshops.
Sarah’s experience illustrates how one focused resource can become a starting point for exploring larger educational opportunities.
Step 3 | Test whether people will buy before investing more
Just because someone asks how something is done doesn’t mean they’ll pay to learn it. That’s why it’s essential to determine whether interest will translates into actual purchases.
One approach is to create a small, usable product using accessible digital tools. Canva can help produce a recipe e-book, Google Sheets can be used for a pricing calculator, and no-code tools such as Lovable can help build a simple app.
Keep it simple. The product should solve one problem and work as promised, without requiring months of development.
To sell the product, add a product page to the bakery’s website explaining the resource, what it offers, what problem it solves and how buyers will access it. A checkout and automated delivery system can deliver the item immediately after purchase.
Be sure to introduce the product to an existing audience. Share it through email newsletters, promote it on social media or display a QR code in-store directing customers to the product page. Employees and industry professionals could offer a demonstration to colleagues or share the new idea within their professional networks.
The aim isn’t to reach thousands of people immediately. It’s to discover whether interested customers are willing to back that interest with a purchase.
A few genuine sales can provide early evidence that the idea is worth developing. If people aren’t buying, feedback can help identify the problem and whether the product, pricing or presentation needs adjusting.
Either way, testing provides valuable information before investing more time or money.
Start with what you already know
For retail bakeries, selling knowledge offers another way to extend the brand experience. For employees and industry professionals, it can create opportunities to earn from skills developed through practical work.
It doesn’t have to begin with an elaborate course or major investment. Sometimes, one useful resource people are willing to pay for to solve a problem is enough to get started.
And if that first product proves valuable, it can become the foundation for something bigger.
