Find Work That Fulfills You with Jenny Berg

The Forrager Podcast for Cottage Food Businesses

Jenny Berg lives in Bend, OR and sells sourdough bread with her cottage food business, Crumb Sourdough Microbakery.

Jenny first started baking sourdough bread in 2020, shortly after the pandemic began.

And so did many others. With people stuck at home, baking sourdough became an extremely popular hobby.

But not many bakers turned their newfound hobby into such a successful business.

When Jenny started selling her bread in 2021, her business took off and she hasn’t looked back since.

She quickly started selling out every single week and eventually had to quit her day job and invest in commercial equipment to ramp up her production.

Jenny now has over 7,000 Instagram followers, and she gets about 1,000 new followers per month! But she explains why the numbers don’t tell the full story.

In this episode, Jenny shares what she’s learned about baking and selling sourdough, how she grew her social accounts twice, how she’s working to improve Oregon’s restrictive cottage food law, and how her cottage food business has finally given her a sense of fulfillment in her work.

What You’ll Learn

• The importance of networking with other entrepreneurs
• The equipment you need to make sourdough bread
• Why Jenny decided to create a strong brand before starting her business
• Why you should get involved in changing your local cottage food law
• A creative method for reducing ingredient costs
• Why you should be collecting customers’ email addresses
• How to grow your Instagram account to thousands of followers
• The process of making sourdough bread
• The difference between homemade and commercial sourdough bread
• Why you should be transparent with your mistakes and failures

Resources

Crumb Sourdough Microbakery website (Instagram | Facebook | News story)

Jenny’s Instagram reel that went viral

Sourdough Bread Ovens:

• Rofco B40
• Simply Bread

Recommended Books:

• Flour Water Salt Yeast , by Ken Forkish
• Tartine Bread, by Chad Robertson

Prominent Sourdough Bakers:

• Maurizio Leo (The Perfect Loaf)
• Elaine Boddy
• Emilie Raffa (The Clever Carrot)
• Pantry Mama
• Humble Bakehouse (now closed)
• Lily’s Loaf
• Carly Cross (Carly’s Flour Shop)
• The Invy Baker

Central Milling (sourcing flour)

Fiverr (logo & branding design)

Institute for Justice (help with amending a cottage food law)

Oregon Cottage Food Law

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Get full show notes and transcript here: https://forrager.com/podcast/74