Cupcakes In Full Bloom with Sarah Thongnopneua

The Forrager Podcast for Cottage Food Businesses

Sarah Thongnopneua lives in San Anselmo, CA and sells very unique and amazing cupcakes with her cottage food business, Baked Blooms.

These are some of the most incredible cupcakes you have ever seen! She calls them “bouCAKES”, meaning cupcakes that look just like a bouquet of flowers.

As you can see from her Instagram account, they really do look like a real bouquets of flowers!

Sarah’s incredible talent has landed her on television twice, including appearing on a Food Network competition that she won.

She has over 23,000 Instagram followers, but what’s especially interesting about Sarah’s story is that when she decided to start her business back in 2016, she knew absolutely nothing about decorating cupcakes like these.

To start her cottage food bakery, she took a decorating class, practiced for a couple of months, and then started selling her cupcakes.

And now she has expanded out of her home into her own commercial kitchen.

In this episode, she shares her amazing journey of creating a business that is far more successful than she could have ever imagined!

What You’ll Learn

• How to use retail stores to market your products, even if you can’t sell them in stores
• Why you should consider pricing products based on their perceived value as a gift
• What part of the year is the busiest for her business
• How to streamline a bakery with custom-decorated items as you scale your business
• Why Sarah offers such a limited number of cake & frosting flavors
• How she got on a Food Network competition and won
• How the pandemic affected her business
• Why she was forced to start using a commercial kitchen
• Why a rented commercial kitchen didn’t work well for her business
• How complicated it was for her to switch from her home kitchen to her own commercial kitchen space
• How Sarah runs cupcake decorating workshops that cost $120/person
• Why she only requires 48 hours of notice for orders

Resources

Baked Blooms website (Instagram | Facebook)

Food Network’s Cupcake Championship: Cacti to Chrysanthemums

Sarah on ABC Localish

Small Business Administration (SBA)

California Cottage Food Law

Sponsor

Castiron

Castiron is the easiest online store builder that I have ever seen, built just for cottage food entrepreneurs like you.

Get full show notes and transcript here: https://forrager.com/podcast/63