Bake Sale Tips

Here are lots of great tips to make your bake sale smooth, fun, and successful.

Links

The following sites have expert advice on choosing and securing a location, promoting the bake sale, attracting customers, creating a "can't miss" table of tasty selections, handling inclement weather, and generally planning, organizing, and profiting from the event.

Most of the recipes in these links aren't vegan. For those, please see our list of vegan recipe sites (with special links to desserts and breads).

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Our Own Bake Sale Tips

• Reserve your bake sale location early! Narrow down the possible sites, get on the phone or visit, get the permissions. Then the exciting and fun stuff can begin apace.
• Possible locations include community centers, public squares, shopping centers, strip malls, pet supply stores, and theatres or sports arenas before or during an event. School groups and religious groups may want to hold the event in their respective schools and places of worship. Craft fairs and festivals are another possible place for a vegan bake sale, although you often have to register early.
• Some open markets or farmers markets will let you hold a bake sale on the premises. Bureaucracy, fees, and requirements may vary widely. But you may get a ton of foot traffic in these locations.
• Some food-coops will be amenable to a bake sale.
• Do you work in a large office building? Check with the building manager to see if you can set up a bake sale in the lobby, or in front of the building or in the courtyard.
• Art galleries and local performance halls may lend or rent you space for your bake sale.
• Are you in a band or other performing group? You and/or your friends might be able to hold bake sales at your shows. One group of musicians and supporters participating in the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale is doing just that.
• If proceeds from your bake sale will be going toward a local charity, you may want to find out if anyone at the charity knows where bake sales for the group have been held before. In many cases, the charity owns or is located in a building, and it might make sense to hold the bake sale there. For example, if the logistics work out, you could have a bake sale in front of the local animal shelter.
• One way to get ideas for possible bake sale locations in your area is to enter the name of your community followed by "bake sale" (in quotes) in an online search engine. You may need to also enter a state or some other qualifier to narrow the search.
• Call your city's parks and recreation department (or the closest thing to that); ask them where you can hold a bake sale. They may be very helpful.
• If your request to use a facility is denied, it may not hurt to ask the representative with whom you're talking for advice on alternate places.
• If you reserved your spot well in advance, check back about three to four weeks before the event, to confirm.

• Go online and/or check with local officials about regulations in your area. For example, many jurisdictions require that everything sold at a bake sale be individually wrapped beforehand. In some European countries, you may need a permit from the health department to sell food at an event.
• If the regulations for bake sales in your town seem too restrictive or confusing, it often helps to contact more than one official; the second person may give you information that the first person didn't know about or failed too mention. Don't hesitate to ask followup questions. Also consider checking one town over if it's nearby; it may have a more streamlined process. Another source of information is church or civic groups that recently held a bake sale in your area.
• In some cases, there are fewer restrictions if you give food away and ask for donations, rather than sell the food outright. Ask officials in your area for details. (Also see how you might be able to an event like this funded.)

• Use fresh ingredients. Don't use flour that's been sitting on the shelf for a year.
• Aim for a super-clean environment when baking. You may not mind when your cat or dog joins you in the kitchen when cooking for yourself, but you and Spot or Tiger should not be in the kitchen at the same time when preparing for a bake sale. You absolutely cannot have one hair in your bake sale items. Double- and triple-check. Speaking of hair, consider using a hairnet. Go the whole nine yards.

• Do know how you would notify all volunteers (not to mention the public) if you had to re-schedule the bake sale at the last minute (e.g., due to inclement weather)?

• If you're raising money for a charity, you can ask local businesses if they'd like to make matching pledges; i.e., donations that match whatever you give to the designated charity from your bake sale proceeds. Get a receipt from the charity when you give them the proceeds; you can present that to businesses that made pledges as proof of the donation to match. (Suggested by a 2009 participant)

• Allow people to pre-order. You can publish a menu of pre-orderable items online.

• Include at least one gluten-free offering.
• Have a plate of samples for people to try.
• Label everything clearly.
• Presentation counts. Attractive serving trays and artfully arranged items may help maintain customers' interest and generate sales. You can spruce up an ordinary platter by covering it with a fancy (but inexpensive) doily.
• For customers who exclaim, “Wow, this doesn't have eggs?” have a stack of our Baking Without Eggs fliers on the table.
• Offer bottled water or some other refreshing beverage. After a slice of chocolate cake, don't you want a drink to wash it down?
• Bring some paper bags, perhaps small and medium size. Customers who buy lots of items or who already have their hands full will appreciate that. Other customers may also request a bag. Bonus: You can put your group's business card, or a flier of area veg-friendly restaurants, or another type of freebie in the bag.
• Have a stack of napkins handy for customers.
• If the bake sale is outside, prepare for wind. If you had, say, a 25 mile-an-hour breeze, what would blow away or fall down? Make sure structures and signs are secure and that lightweight objects such as napkins and fliers are weighted down.
• Bring plenty of change. To make things easier, have all your prices end in .00 or .50. Also, you may want to, for example, sell plates of three small cookies for a dollar (or equivalent unit in your local currency) rather than sell each cookie individually.
• Although this will never happen, in theory if you have a lot of unsold inventory and there's only a half hour left in the bake sale, you can mark items down and/or offer volume discounts.
• Does your group have a mailing list, or membership application? Bring forms and pens so people can sign up.
• Tape, scissors, rubber bands, and magic markers come in handy in a myriad of ways.
• You can purchase various sizes of "to-go" boxes in which to put merchanise that you sell to customers. This is one way to keep things like frosting from getting smashed. Shop around and look online; prices vary. You may need to buy in bulk.
• This isn't our tip, but it's worth repeating: Place a jar for donations on the table. Both purchasers and non-purchasers of baked goods may want donate money to help the cause.
• Consider giving away a prize to one or more lucky customers, through a raffle or similar system. A vegan cookbook signed by the author makes a nice prize, but the possibilities are endless. You'll need to get entrants' contact info (email or phone number), and decide how to convey the prize to the winner. (Suggested by a 2009 participant)
• If there's no seating in the vicinity, and you've got the space, bring a few chairs so customers who want to eat right away can sit down.
• You may want to include some homemade vegan dog treats for your canine "customers."
• Ask visitors to your bake sale how they found out about the event. This may help your marketing in the future.
• If you have enough personnel, for maximum cleanliness designate one person to handle money and non-food items only.
• Be the most gracious, appreciative guests ever. Leave the place spic and span and you'll get invited back next year, or sooner.

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Bake Sales for Non-Bakers

You don't have to a baker to have a bake sale! Here are a bunch of "bakeless" options:

• Everyone has two friends who like to bake—even if they don't know it. If you ask friends, family members, co-workers, classmates, fellow soccer parents, the outfielders on your softball team (okay, maybe not them) to contribute to a bake sale, two of them will say, “Sure, I'll bake a batch of cookies." When you tell them it's a vegan bake sale, they might give you a quizzical look or say “no problem” depending on their familiarity with vegan baking. If it's the former, point them to our vegan baking tips page, tell them it's easy, and they'll enjoy the simple challenge—and probably come up with something irresistably scrumptious.
• Local bakeries will usually participate and give you a good deal. In return, you should probably display the bakery's card on your table or otherwise give them some publicity. Let them know that the bake sale is vegan. Some bakers will scoff (have a hardcopy of our "baking without eggs" sheet handy), but most will accommodate you or have a couple of items already that are vegan, even if they're a very non-vegan bakery.
• Consider mixes. Goodbaker makes great cookie and brownie mixes for which you only have to add water. Put the mixture in a pan, bake it, and presto—you have a platter of delicious bake sale-ready desserts. Also check out mixes by Simply Organic, Dr. Oetker, and Cherrybrook Kitchen. In fact, it's easy to veganize most cookie, brownie, cake, and muffin mixes. Just use an egg substitute and nondairy milk. If someone asks for the recipe, it can be like in those TV commercials where they say, incredulously, “Really? This was from a mix?” For best results, try out the mix before using it in a bake sale. Some mixes you'll love; others...you won't love.