As mentioned in my About page, I started Go Sweet Fox during Covid. I had a dream that I was walking around town (Idaho Falls) and everyone was like, “Hey! There’s the cheesecake guy!” And I would point over to them like, “Yeah! What’s up?!”
It was like the scene from Spider-Man 3 with Tobey McGuire:
…only in my dream, it was not so creepy. It was actually cool.
Selling Cheesecakes
Through the process of developing The Ultimate World’s Best Cheesecake Recipe, I discovered that many people like to share different flavors of cheesecake. I had the idea to make a number of smaller-sized cheesecakes instead of one large one. We could make five 4-inch cheesecakes out of one batch of normal cheesecake.
My wife and I set out to advertise our mini-cheesecakes for Thanksgiving 2020.
To do this, we just went around the neighborhood posting flyers. We contacted basically everyone we knew to let them know they could get cheesecakes from us.
We only wanted to sell to people we knew because cheesecake is not a “cottage food.” Cottage foods are foods that do not require refrigeration. In Idaho, you can sell cottage foods without a food license or permit.
Since cheesecakes are not cottage food, you would need to obtain a license and sell them out of a commercial kitchen. This is a much more expensive endeavor.
This is why we only sold to friends and neighbors who we didn’t think would mind.
All-in-all, we got about $500 of cheesecake in our first advertised go at it. Our hard costs were about $125 in ingredients. This means that over Thanksgiving, we made a net profit of roughly $375.
An Evaluation of the Cheesecake Business
I loved creating the cheesecake recipe and creating the Go Sweet Fox brand and concept. But baking a ton of cheesecakes to fill orders was not that great. I think a lot of this had to do with limited capacity.
Cheesecakes take a looooong time to bake. Here’s the breakdown:
Prep time: 30 min
Initial baking: 45 min
Cool down (in oven): 1 hr
Cool down (out of oven): 1 hr
Refrigeration: 4 hrs
Packaging: 1 hr
Delivery: 1.5 hrs
TOTAL TIME: 8 hours and 45 min
And we did at least 4 batches of cheesecake. Since we were able to overlap the cooldown and baking times, I would estimate that we spent at least 25 hours on these cheesecake orders from beginning to end.
If you divide the net profit of $375 by the 25 hours spent, you would get how much we made per hour. This is $375/25 = $15/hr.
That’s right, $15 per hour. Not that good.
So while it was a fun experiment. It was more about the proof of concept than actual profit.
Lessons Learned From Selling Cheesecakes
One of the main things I learned is that I enjoyed experimenting with the recipes and doing the creative side of things, but I did not particularly enjoy mass-producing cheesecakes to fill orders.
If I wanted to keep selling cheesecakes, it would need to be a lot more profitable.
The only way to do that is to raise the price or decrease the costs.
You can only increase the price so much. I also thought our pricing was already aggressive.
Selling cheesecakes out of our home was not an option. After all, it’s not even legal. Even if we could legally do so, it was not practically feasible.
We lacked the necessary baking capacity because we were stuck with one home oven. If we could batch-bake a bunch of cheesecakes at once, that would make the business idea more attractive.
At the same time, though, obtaining a commercial kitchen adds to the expense.
Even if we did a kitchen rental, we had to figure out where to store and sell the cheesecakes we made.
We explored options of renting kitchen space or even partnering with local bakeries.
While there were people who were willing to figure out a commercial space with us, another issue was time.
I was a solo attorney with a full-time practice. I could not realistically practice law and attend to a commercial kitchen at the same time.
It was just not workable without a huge investment in cash to hire people, rent space, and create inventory.
I just didn’t want to do that.
Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater
I know of a couple of businesses that are doing what I was aiming to do. In Utah, there is Momo’s Gourmet Cheesecakes. In Seattle, there is The Confectional at Pike Place.
So I know the business is possible and there is demand for it out there.
But I was just not in a place where I could jump into the fray and commit the time (or money) needed to build such a business.
At the time, I just needed to focus on my law practice or I was going to get sued for malpractice.
As a result, we shut down the project. I let the website sit mostly dormant and decided not to renew my domain hosting (I was at a more expensive domain host).
Starting From Scratch
When my domain host lapsed, I did not transfer over the content I had created that was stored on their servers. As a result, the only content I had was from an older WordPress version on a separate server.
I have also since sold my solo law practice and took an in-house legal position. As an employee, I have more free time than I had as a solo practitioner. It’s very nice in many ways to be on the payroll.
So now I’m essentially starting from scratch again.
This time, I’m only going to focus on blogging about desserts, candy, and treats.
I’m not going to open a commercial kitchen.
