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Selling Homemade Cookies Online

Have you always dreamed of selling homemade cookies online? If so, you can become the top seller of gourmet cookies near me by transforming a simple recipe into a winning formula. Then, before you know it, you’ll get to serve as your own boss and build a successful business from the ground up.

Since they’re portable, customizable, and easy to love, cookies are some of the best baked goods to sell from home. With just a quick brainstorming session, you can easily come up with cookie business ideas for practically everyone. Simple chocolate chip cookies offer tons of nostalgia, for example, while fully-loaded brownie cookies satisfy every craving in just one bite.

Want to go all out in creating unique cookies? Think yuzu coolers, vegan almond butter, and chai snickerdoodles to start. You could also go with fully-decorated macarons, artistically iced sugar cookies, and multi-colored pinwheels to help your online cookie business stand out from the crowd.

You might even want to focus on creating cookies for each and every holiday, giving people something to look forward to as the days go by. The sky is the limit in what cookies you can make as long as you know how and where to sell homemade cookies.

Although you just need a recipe to get started, there’s a lot more to learning how to sell homemade cookies and make a small fortune, of course. Thankfully, you can learn all you need to know from this informative guide. So, take a peek, and then get ready to take your first steps toward selling cookies online.

How Profitable Is a Cookie Business?

While cookie business success stories always start with tons of passion, you must be able to turn a profit to stay afloat. Fortunately, selling cookies for profit is as easy as pie as long as you take the right approach. So, don’t sit there wondering, “How profitable is a cookie business?” Start doing the math to pin down your earnings potential.

To figure out how much to charge for cookie trays, boxes, and everything in between, you will need to add up the total cost of creating each batch. When pricing homemade cookies to sell, start by adding up the cost of ingredients and other supplies used to make each batch.

Then, figure out how much to charge for your hourly rate and make a test batch to see how long it takes to create your cookies. If you set a $30 per hour rate and it takes 30 minutes to make each batch of cookies, add $15 to your ingredient and supply total.

After that, add in other costs, like a few dollars for electricity to run the oven and a small amount for wear and tear on your tools. Don’t forget packaging, nutrition labels, marketing, and all the other costs of selling homemade cookies online.

To set cookie prices per dozen, figure out how many cookies each batch makes, and then divide the total expenses by that number. If each batch of 36 cookies costs $30, for example, then each dozen costs $10 to make. At this point, you’ll want to pad the total by 20% to 50% to ensure you make a profit. So, you’ll want to sell your cookies for $12 to $15 per dozen to make enough money to stay in business.

Repeat this process for every type of cookies you’ll make to dial in your pricing based on your exact costs for each batch. As you do that, you’ll likely notice that your chocolate chip cookies price list greatly differs from your custom sugar cookie prices. Once all your prices are calculated, it’s time to move on to learning how to make money selling baked goods from home.

How to Sell Cookies From Home

Before you can even think about becoming the premier source for homemade cookies for sale near me, you need to get all your business details squared away. Otherwise, you could end up on the wrong side of the law despite having the best homemade cookie recipes around.

Start by checking the cottage food laws in your state. In many locations, you’re okay to sell cookies since they’re unlikely to spoil fast or require refrigeration. But, you might have to abide by restrictions like not adding fresh fruit to your decorations. You may also need to get your food handler’s permit and have your kitchen inspected before you start making cookies.

Once you do all that, look up a cookies business plan sample and write up your own version. Your business plan should outline your company’s main objective, business name and structure, initial products, cookie marketing ideas, and all the other line items you need to create a solid company.

You can then follow the business plan to achieve great success as you learn how to sell cookies from home. At this point, move forward in registering your company’s name with the state and creating a logo. Before you make your first batch of cookies, design your product labels, create nutritional labels, and buy packaging for your products as well.

Finally, decide how you will get your homemade cookies into the hands of your local customers. Will you go with gourmet cookies delivered as your business model? If so, you’ll want to create an online shop, and then follow your marketing plan for cookie business success. As long as you have a plan and stick to it, you can slowly build your reputation as the top place to get tasty cookies on demand.

Selling Cookies Online

Successfully selling cookies online requires a functional e-commerce store and a strong digital brand presence. Before you can start digging in on how to promote cookies online, you need to set up your products in a digital storefront.

You can do that quite easily on a dedicated platform, like Castiron, which presents your homemade cookies online in the best light while making it easy for customers to complete their purchases. On top of that, a great e-commerce store makes it easy to manage your inventory of homemade cookies for sale, take custom orders, and build strong relationships with your customers.

Once you build an e-commerce store and fill it with your products, it’s time to explore how to advertise homemade cookies. As a part of that, you might want to take a deep dive on how to sell cookies on Instagram.

Through that popular photo-centric platform, you can get your customers dreaming about your cookies just as long as you follow the selling on Instagram rules, like:

In addition, you should make sure that cookies are on the allowed list for what to sell on Instagram (2021). Want to increase your web presence? Keep in mind that those are the same rules you’ll need to follow when exploring how to sell cookies on Facebook as well.

If you decide to move forward in using your techniques on how to sell on Instagram for free, create a page for your business, write up your bio, and start posting. Then, do the same on Facebook.

To best learn how to promote cookies on Instagram, just experiment with different types of posts, like close-ups of your cookies, quick tutorials, and personal anecdotes. Just make sure to link to your Castiron store in each post and get ready to see just how to sell cookies online successfully.

After that, you just have to monitor the engagement with each type of post to see what resonates most with your customers. Over time, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t, helping guide the way toward building up your brand presence online.

Cottage Food Law

In order to keep selling your award-winning homemade cookies online, you must always abide by cottage food law. The laws vary from state to state and have the potential to change over time. So, keep a close eye on the laws for your area, like if you can sell food on the Facebook marketplace. For most states, the answer is yes, as long as the items do not need refrigeration.

Things change, however, if you’re asking, “Can you sell food on Facebook without a license?” In order to abide by cottage food law, you need a license, hands down. You might also need to get a food handler’s permit and complete an inspection of your kitchen to fully comply with local laws. Otherwise, you could get shut down fast and even end up with serious fines.

To avoid losing your investment, first answer the question, “Do you need a license to sell baked goods from home?” After you handle that, you can dig into the details on whether it’s okay to start selling baked goods from home in Texas, Oregon, Vermont, or wherever else you might live.

In addition to licensing, local cottage food laws may control how you package, label, and market your products. In certain states, you might even have to change how you decorate your homemade cookies to avoid ending up on the wrong side of the law.

In general, if the products have ingredients that could spoil quickly, you likely have to change up the recipe to get rid of them. If your homemade cookies have low-acid fruit butter, for example, then you’ll need to alter your approach and use high-acid fruit butter instead.

Although it might seem complicated, it’s worth figuring out just how to successfully sell homemade cookies online before you start making your dreams come true. With that move, you can avoid major repercussions and stay on track in building your winning cookie business.

Learn how to start selling homemade cookies online, how to make money selling your cookies, and how to make sure you're running a legal food business.

Heather Brookshire

The Cake Whisperer

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The Whimsical Cookie

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Castiron provides me a professional site to my customers increasing my credibility and value while giving me the tools to effectively market and manage my business in an easy, user-friendly manner.

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Wesley's Treats Hallie's Sweets

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Castiron has made my cottage bakery shine, and my business easy to manage. As a platform they care about my business as much as I do.

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Mill City Cooking Company

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Oso Good Clean Eats

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Kultured Kombucha

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I realized that the barrier of having to DM or text me to order was holding a lot of potential customers back.

Now that I have a professional website and a simple ecommerce checkout, I'm seeing a huge increase in new customers and they appreciate how easy Castiron makes ordering.

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