The home bakery guide · Texas edition

Start a home bakery in Texas — this month, not someday.

You can do this!

The friendly, checklist-shaped guide to selling what you bake — legally, confidently, and without losing your joy. Ten short chapters that take you from “I wonder if I could” to your first ten customers, with one small step at the end of each.

$20 once, yours for good · instant access by email · works beautifully on your phone

A home bakery's front-porch stand, open for business — shelves of labeled cookies, muffins, cinnamon rolls, a layer cake, and fresh sourdough, with a 'baked with love' sign and flowers

If you only do five things

A home bakery is really just five things

1. Price one recipe. 2. Take the 2-hour food-safety course (Texas’s one requirement). 3. Print one label. 4. Tell ten people you already know. 5. Flip your page live.

That’s a home bakery. Everything else in the guide — the photos, the branding, the weekly rhythm — makes it better, not real. The guide just walks you through all five, slowly, with your answers saved as you go.

It doesn’t just tell you — it builds it with you

Each chapter hands you the right tool at the exact step you need it — already filled with your answers.

Price it so it pays you

Chapter 4 walks one recipe through the 15-minute pricing method — cost, floor, your wage, packaging — then the calculator runs the same worksheet for every recipe after, checked against real Texas porch-shop prices.

Your legal Texas label, built line by line

Chapter 5 plus the label maker: every element your state requires — including the strict wording you never have to type yourself — print-ready for Avery sheets.

A porch shop page, assembled as you go

Each chapter’s homework lands on a real page — your name, your menu, your pickup rhythm — so going live at the end is a flip, not a build.

A launch plan, not a launch leap

Photos that sell (chapter 6), an order flow without the tech headache (chapter 7), and the one-post-ten-texts launch (chapter 8) — sequenced so each step is small.

The tools themselves are free for every home baker — what the guide adds is the path through them: the right one at the right step, your answers carried from chapter to chapter, nothing to figure out alone.

A workbook that remembers you

Checklists stay checked. What you write stays written. Come back Tuesday night and your guide is exactly where you left it — half-filled-in, like a real one.

Ten small steps, not one big leap

Every chapter ends with one next step. By the last page you have a priced recipe, a legal label with your shop name on it, a launch post ready to publish, and your first sale behind you.

Verified against Texas law

The legal chapters trace to the actual Texas Health & Safety Code (chapter 437, as rewritten in 2025) and DSHS’s own guidance — the same primary sources behind our free Texas cottage food law page. We verify it against the statutes, not your specific kitchen, so it’s educational, not legal advice. Verified June 2026, and your link always opens the current edition.

A grand opening, on us

When you open, send us your link — your page or your Instagram — and we’ll post about your new porch shop on The Front Porch’s Instagram and point neighbors your way.

What’s inside

Ten chapters. Each one ends with a step you can take tonight.

  1. You can do thisread freeThe demand is already there.
  2. Your path, in one pageOne state-level path plus an optional free upgrade — pick in a few quick checks.
  3. What you actually needThe whole start list, under $200.
  4. Price it like you mean to keep goingThe 15-minute method that pays you.
  5. Your label, done in a sittingFive honest lines — that’s the whole requirement.
  6. Phone photos that sellLight is the whole game.
  7. Taking orders without the tech headacheText list → form → cap your orders.
  8. Your first ten customersOne post and ten texts — your founding customers.
  9. Keep it joyfulBoundaries are the business.
  10. Opening dayYour first sale — and the rhythm that grows it.

Written for the baker who keeps almost starting

You already bake. Your neighbors already buy bread, cookies, and birthday cakes — they’d rather buy them from you. What’s been missing isn’t skill or demand; it’s a clear path through the legal part, the pricing part, and the “okay, but how do I actually tell people” part. That’s the whole guide.

Texas rewrote its cottage food law in 2025 into one of the friendliest in the country — $0 in state fees, no permit, no license, no inspection, a $150,000 cap (rising with inflation), and your city can’t even require a permit. The one requirement is a two-hour food-safety course (priced by the provider — many are modest). The guide walks you through every step of that, in plain English, with your own answers saved as you go.

Get the guide — $20

Educational, not legal advice — the free Texas cottage food law carries every citation, and it stays free either way. Questions? hello@thefrontporch.store.