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Make Money Selling Baked Goods Online
If you’re a baker who would like to turn your talent into a sideline business, online marketplace Etsy.com might be the place to start. While mostly known for selling crafts, some bakers are finding Etsy is a great place to sell breads, cookies, cakes, pastries and other food items.
    “Business really boomed with the stay-at-home order due to Covid-19 in March,” says Sandra Green, listed under TheCountryBakers on the Etsy website.
    “After Christmas I usually get 5 to 7 orders a week, but suddenly in March I was getting 5 to 7 orders a day,” says the Clearwater, Kansas, baker. The pace slowed by mid-summer. She gained many new regular customers from New York, California and states in between who discovered her when they couldn’t buy their favorite treats locally.
    Green initially sold baked items through a Farmers Market in Wichita, which she helped found in 1990. In 2012, she and her mom decided to try Etsy for their crafts and baked goods. When Green and her husband moved to Florida, she continued the business selling on Etsy. The Greens recently moved back to Kansas to take over her family’s farm and are building a new home.
    Being online, it doesn’t matter where she lives, Green says. And she sells year round, which makes it more appealing than seasonal farmers markets. She says the Etsy process is easy, even for people who don’t use the computer a lot. She filled out a profile to get started and takes photos and writes descriptions of the products she wants to sell. Etsy charges 20 cents per item every 4 months and takes 5 percent of her total income.
    Thanks to her flock of chickens, Green never runs out of eggs, which are important for one of her best sellers.
    “I sell a lot of angel food cakes,” she says, even though it costs $35 including shipping.
    Besides the baked goods, she sells mixes for everything from bread to pasta and soup. She also sells Emergency Preparedness Meals, with dehydrated ingredients that just need to be cooked in water for an entrée such as chicken fried rice or Alfredo chicken.
    “I created those while I was in Florida for hurricane season,” Green says, adding there was big demand during this spring’s lockdown. Instead of buying all her dehydrated food, she purchased a dehydrator so she can use vegetables from her own large garden.
    “To be successful, you have to be determined and stick with it,” she says.
    Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Sandra Green, www.etsy.com (TheCountryBakers); Facebook: The Country Bakers.


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2020 - Volume #44, Issue #5