Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Bakery Business from Home in Singapore
If you love to bake and are positive with your skills, beyond any doubt, you should turn your hobby into a profitable venture of selling your baked treats. Bakeries are a sought-after class of foodservice enterprise that allows you to exhibit your baking prowess and culinary creativity. However, even people with non-culinary backgrounds can enter the industry with ease by opening a home-based bakery.
Recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many micro-small baking enterprises worldwide go through hardships, while others shut down. Due to this, many have begun selling their bakes and pastries online while at home.
With a home-based baking business, you can bake and sell at home aside from cookies or cupcakes the following, but not limited to:
- Pastries
- Bread
- Bread rolls
- Pies
- Bagels
- Pretzels
- Muffins
As an aspiring baker-entrepreneur, the thought of doing something enjoyable yet profitable will always come to your mind. However, people often feel they do not have any professional experience or background and are not familiar with the governmental guidelines and regulations in opening up a home-based baking business, so it can be burdensome to know where to start. In this article, you will find helpful tips to guide you to open your bakery successfully in the comfort of your own home. This guide will also allow you to fully operateTherepractical information necessary to ensure you are legally compliant and impart knowledge to your premises’ efficient and ethical business operations.
What Is a Home-based Bakery Business?
A Home-based Bakery Business is a business venture usually smaller in scale than wholesale and retail bakeries. Owners of these enterprises have the opportunity to produce and sell flour-based food products baked in an oven at home.
Why Choose to Start a Home Baking Business in Singapore?
Establishing this business does not require you any professional background in culinary or work experience in markets. All you need to have is your drive. If you are not still sure this is the right business venture for you, here are some reasons to pursue a home-based bakery at home:
Low Cost as the Business Is From Home
You will save money because you can do all the work without hiring employees. You can also save utility bills and rent expenses. Apart from that, you do not need to have to pay for a special license to operate.
It Allows You to Invent and Discover New Recipes
What you make and the process of doing your work is all in your hands. Through experiment and trial and error, you may discover a new recipe that can make your business grow.
It Offers You the Ability to Create Your Workflow and Schedule
Your business operation is all in your control. No one will order you when to start working.
Requirements You Need to Have to Start Your Bakery at Home
Here are several things you must be knowledgeable about when entering the home-based baking industry:
Knowledge about safe food preparation and latent dietary and health concerns as some customers might be allergic to cashew nuts or clients who have high sugar levels.
By having various raw materials, ingredients, and equipment with a storage room for them, there can be avoidance of probable contamination and spoilage.
Imagination and curiosity to make your products stand out among others. Although, you must understand as well the tight competition among your fellow home bakers.
Passion, perseverance, and trust in yourself to champion any hurdles you might encounter along your home baking business journey are what you need the most.
Legally, to open a bakery business in Singapore, you must follow the requirements and guidelines set by the authorities. One must adhere to the following requirements for your venture to commence:
- You have to register a company with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority in Singapore for you to proceed to the other steps;
- The next thing is for you to apply for a tax identification number (TIN) to the internal bureau, for a GST number, and register as well for social security;
- You have to find a location suitable for you to cook, produce, and sell your treats, and preferably because you aim to open a bakery at home, your residential space is your location.
- Fourth, you need to apply for a food shop license with the Singapore National Environment Agency to ensure food quality safety and control;
- Lastly, apply for other special licenses, such as import or export permits, if ingredients are importations from other countries.
Guidelines for Starting a Home-Based Bakery Business in Singapore
To fully operate, there are compliances you have to make your business lawful, and the Housing and Development Board (HDB) and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) set Singapore’s guidelines for any home business. When setting up a home-based baking business in Singapore, a license is not required. Still, you need to register your business as prescribed by section 5 of the Business Names Registration Act (BNRA), except those exempted by the law.
Below are the following guidelines your home baking business should adhere to:
- Business Address: HDB Flat Address should not be registered as Your Business Address HDB Flat Addresses is exclusively for private residential spaces. You may only use your private residential address provided the immaterial change of use of your residential premise.
- Business Activities: Your business should not cause any trouble and discomfort to neighbors near your house. You should not use heavy equipment and machinery as well which are suitable for domestic use. Hiring additional workers, staff, procuring storage, and the shipment of goods is not required pursuant to the guidelines.
- Advertising: Putting and paying for any form of physical advertisements such as board signs outside your flat is not allowed. Promotions using print media like newspapers and magazines and any online social media site are also within the guidelines’ restriction. Aside from that, you can only sell your products to your relatives, friends, acquaintances, and people you know.
- Selling: You cannot sell any baked products in any food stalls or join any food fair and other similar events.
Aside from those mentioned above, adherence to the Health and Safety Standards issued by the National Environment Agency (NEA) must be done. The standards ensure the safety, quality, and hygiene of your products. A graded system of checking subjects public cafes and eateries; however, this is not possible to do in residential spaces.
The food hygiene guidelines for Home Based Small Scale Business Scheme set by the NEA are:
- You must maintain personal hygiene all the time to ensure food safety.
- The workplace and the appliances used should be clean and disinfected to avoid any form of food contamination.
- The quality and expiration dates of raw materials should undergo constant checking to ensure safety to consume once produced.
- Food and ingredients should be stored properly at the right temperature and in the right places.
How to Grow a Home-Based Baking Business in Singapore?
Joining a Community of Bakers and Bakery Owners
Being part of a community with the same interests as you help embark on your plan of putting up a business may benefit you with access to recipes and events and have connections with other bakers. The community may also promote the baked products and streamline your delivery and selling of goods.
Making Your Business Public
Another way to help your home baking business grow is to go beyond the small-scale business scheme. In case the demand increases and you wish to make higher returns, obtaining a Food Shop Licence will hasten your shifting. However, either the URA or HDB requires you to submit planning permission with documents such as a tenancy agreement.
Introduce Yourself to Other Local Businesses
You never know, there may be a business interested in your products. When that happens, be prepared to have some samples and have with you your business plan. Think also about your ability to deliver goods regularly without trying to overcommit.
Find Support
For starters, it will not be going to be easy. You will need other people at your back as you come with a limited budget. Finding great people to assist you in realizing your passion for success through financial aids or even emotional support eases all the time-consuming processes that suck your will to continue. It is significant to keep you pushing through.
Conclusion
Opening a home-based baking business can be complicated and difficult for the first time. There is a lot to consider and do before you can even start producing and selling your products. Businesses like these take years, even decades anticipating to become successful. However, it is also possible that your sweet baked treats will also evolve as you hone and develop your abilities and as you receive responses from your clients.
Bear in mind to try something new, and immerse yourself in things you do not know, as many popular products of today have transformed through trials and errors over the decades.
