Hello to all the experts!!!

I am at a point in my biz that I either need to put a commercial kitchen in my home, "somewhere", rent a commercial space, or have a small bakery storefront the sells some retail pastries, coffee, etc, but also a specialty cake studio.

Does anyone have an opinion on which way to go???? My youngest is about to be in school and I don't really want to go back to teaching school (what I did before cake design). I can stay small with no overhead or branch out with overhead, but ability to grow. Right now I don't have enough oven and fridge space to take the bigger orders that keep coming my way......

If you can bake commercially from home I would definitely start there, Iowa has a cottage food law so you should contact your local dept of health (or whoever manages food safety) to get the details.

The next step would be to rent a commercial kitchen once you have a good amount of sales volume, startup costs for kitchen rentals are very low so you won't have as much sunk cost if it doesn't work out. Once you have enough sales to support the increased overhead of a retail bakery (and enough retained earnings in your business to pay the startup costs) you can start looking at opening a storefront.

All this should be detailed in your business plan, which is the first step before you start accepting customers. Just realize that it will probably be at least a few years before you can draw enough of a salary to compete with a teaching job.

Thanks for the reply.
Yes Iowa's laws aren't super strict. I can bake cake and cookie items only, types that don't require total refrigeration from home if I sell less than $20,000. My biggest problem is finding the space and spending the money on renovating a portion of my house instead of just spending the money on a commercial kitchen. Of course now it's a question of rent!!!

What I plan on doing is starting in a commercial bakery in my garage. I have 4 kids, 3 of which I home school, the other is almost 2. I would love a little retail locstion and a couple employees, but I know there is no posssible way I would be able to maintain it right now. I figure that by starting small at home, I can have very little overhead and work on my terms while the kids are small. If I still want to have a retail location once they are older, then I can always gut my garage and move it all to a retail location.

I love my separate commercial kitchen. We have a large house and I took over the bottom level (above ground). The convenience is wonderful. We own a commercial building a mile from our house, but that would not have been as enjoyable. It was just as expensive to redo our home as the commercial building, so the decision was made to keep the convenience.