05/14/2025
Hello everyone. I want to offer my sincerest apologies for canceling the launch party less than an hour before and not announcing it across all platforms. Beyond that, it deeply saddens me to announce The Little Fork Bakery will not be moving forward. So many people have been so supportive of this endeavor and it pains me to disappoint you all. At the very least, you deserve to know why. A more detailed explanation is in the following slides. But, put simply, I ultimately could not do what I set out to do with the bakery in terms of the business itself and how it fits into my personal life.
As you may have seen on the About page of my website, The Little Fork Bakery was opened now because I struggled to find a job that could support me as a student and a disabled person. I believed that I could scale the bakery up and down in terms of how many orders I accepted to match whatever my physical capabilities and class load required of me. And I likely could have, but there was more to it than that that I didn’t account for. Baking at home I can take breaks as needed, lie down if necessary, and start late one day if I pushed myself too hard the day before. None of that was possible in the commercial kitchen. I had to book time in advance and I would pay from the time I was scheduled to start to the time I finished cleaning up. Meaning that if I overworked myself one day and started an hour late the next day as a result, I had to pay for that hour. If I stayed an hour late to make-up lost time, I paid for that too. In the days leading up to the launch party, I was working 12-16 hours a day and taking less than 15 minutes total of a break because I had to pay for that time too. Baking at home I could manage my physical limitations and take care of myself while being productive. Baking in the kitchen, managing my disabilities literally cost me money, so I was incentivized to push past my limits. After doing so for several days straight, I reached the point I could no longer function the day of the party and had to cancel. I’ve spent the last week and a half recuperating and reevaluating my plan for the bakery.
In my first week at the kitchen, I was planing to work 8-9 hours a day and get 3-4 items done. While preparing for licensing process, I timed how long it took me to make everything and used that information when determining prices. I thought that once I was in the kitchen, I could start one item while the last was in the oven, allowing some overlap. In reality, it took at least as long as the bake time to reset between items, often times longer. I also increased the batch size of almost all of my items in order to be more efficient and keep prices down. This resulted in simply getting all of the doughs and batters from the mixing bowl to the proper pans taking hours. A batch of sugar cookie would take less than 20 mins to make, but over 2 hours to get shaped, rolled in the topping, and on the pan. My timings at home also did not account for cleaning and packaging. I thought the overlap between starting one item while another bakes would account for that. Even if I had been able to do so, the timing would not have evened out. Altogether, an 8 hour shift would only allow me to complete 2 items a day, not 3-4. Affordability is a key value of The Little Fork Bakery and adjusting our prices to reflect timing realities made that impossible. I am simply not willing to charge $3.50 for a 2” wedge of plain shortbread or $9.55 for a single vanilla cupcake with no filling. The only way around this would have been to pay myself far below minimum wage, and running the bakery takes too much time and too much from me physically for that to be workable.
The amount I ultimately could make in a day also meant I would have to work 7 days a week. I needed to do 2 markets a week to hopefully sell a majority of what I make and build up a customer base for after the market season. Those were going to be Saturdays and Sundays. I would need all day Fridays to get everything ready for the markets. That left 4 days a week and with only making 2 things a day, working all 4 days would mean only restocking 8 products a week. If I sold as much as I hoped at markets, 8 products a week was already pushing it, any less would just not have worked, meaning I’d get no days off.
I opened The Little Fork to have an income that supported me as a student and disabled person. To continuing running it as I hoped, I would have to work 7 days a week for 3 months, taking less than the legally required breaks and pay myself less than minimum wage for all the hours in the kitchen, and not all for time spent at markets. I would have destroyed myself physically. Even if I managed to get through to the end of the summer, I would be too burnt out and in too much pain to be a student in the fall. I already took this past school year off to focus on my health, I’m not ruining it further and jeopardizing my education.
I considered many alternatives before coming to this decision. Raising prices to the point I’d need to would go against everything I wanted the bakery to be. Only doing 1 market a week and working less would not generate enough revenue to be sustainable. Hiring an additional employee would make the bakery bigger than I ever wanted it to be, would add a lot of additional expenses beyond just their wage, and I just wouldn’t feel right hiring someone for a business that I don’t know will be successful and could close in a month. I would also be concerned that I wouldn’t make enough money to cover all of my essentials and their wage.
I wanted so badly to do this. So many people have said they were proud of me for doing this and it hurts letting them all down. I haven’t spoken to anyone but my fiancé in over a week because I’m so ashamed. If I could find a way to make this work without jeopardizing my health and education, I would. I made The Little Fork Bakery to be a business that would support me as a student and a disabled person, but it can’t. As much as I want it to, as much work as I’ve put into it so far, it can’t. I may not have been smart in deciding to attempt this in the first place, but I’m at least smart enough to not let it ruin everything I was trying to protect.
Over the next week, I will be posting our current inventory and selling it at a discounted rate. Anything we do not currently have prepared will not be available and once an item is sold out, it’s gone.
Thank you everyone for all of your support. I am sorry to let you down.
