The Baker's Trade: A Recipe for Creating the Successful Small Bakery

This is the first book ever to explain everything needed to work through the thicket of rules, procedures, and tasks for starting and running a prosperous retail or wholesale bakery.

It gets going with "a day at the bakery," then takes up baking and business skills, start-up costs, sources of financing, legal and tax matters, local planning and heatlh regulations, retail and kitchen layout and design, adding a cafe or deli, getting supplies at the best prices, the product list, pricing and costs, marketing and public relations, maintenance and clean-up, employees, expansion and diversification, common business problems, and the business plan.

Checklists, profiles of successful bakeries, plus an appendix of further reading, baking/culinary schools, professional associations, a model personnel manual, and a list of software supplement the text.

Zachary Schat is a fifth-generation baker. After graduating from the University of California he bought a struggling shop his father had recently acquired. In five years he tripled daily gross sales to $1,500; then he opened a branch across town. Besides his own start-up experience, he brings 150 years of his family's baking background to the book.