Bakeries entered the fray with Get to Work, but so many of the mechanics in The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies expansion elevate your culinary career to new heights! With new sweets to create in your bakery, coffees to serve, and customers to attract, you’ll have a more successful sweets shop than ever.
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While you can run a successful bakery with just the items included in Businesses & Hobbies, there are plenty of other packs that play nicely with bakeries in this one. Grab some tools from Get to Work or Home Chef Hustle and prepare to whip up wonders.
How To Open A Bakery
Business Activities Dictate Customer And Employee Behavior
While the Businesses & Hobbies expansion pack comes with plenty of preset businesses you can run (especially if you’re playing it in conjunction with other expansion packs), unfortunately, there’s not a very straightforward way to open a bakery. As such, you’ll need to get a little creative to use Business Activities to make a bakery in this pack, which you can do when you Register a Small Business.
Using the Business Activities, you can choose to set up a bakery with Bake, Browse and Buy Items, Eat, Make Treats, and any optional fifth Activity of your choice. Things like Drink Coffee pair well if you have a coffee bar on-site, while encouraging Friendly social interactions is always a good idea for customer-facing positions.
If you’re playing with Get Together installed, you can get somewhat close to a sit-down bakery by starting with the Cafe preset. This preset encourages drinking coffee, eating, and reading, so if there are baked goods available for sale on the property, guests can purchase them to eat in while they relax. The two locations are very easy to fold into one bakery/cafe.
Essential Bakery Items
Bakeries (and any food-based establishment) will need a handful of essential Buy Mode items to function. You’ll need to be able to bake all those baked goods, after all! While you’re able to bring items from home to any Small Business venue with your Sim’s inventory, it’s always best to make things on-site when possible, since it’s the best way to ensure they stay fresh for longest.
The basics you’ll need to operate a functional bakery are:
- Ovens, to ensure that Sims who have high Baking skills are consistently creating new sweets to sell to your hungry customers.
- Refrigerators, from which you’ll gather ingredients.
- Sinks to wash hands and do dishes when pastries are sold.
- Sales cases to display the items you’ve got on offer that day.
From there, the rest is up to you and your creativity! We’ve seen players build lush eat-in bakeries with tables and chairs for customers, bookshelves to give them something to do while they’re around the shop, stages for open mic nights, and so much more.
Other Packs Accentuate Bakeries In Businesses & Hobbies
As mentioned with the business presets, there are a few other expansion packs that play well with a bakery when you’re using the Small Business options in Businesses & Hobbies. We gained access to tons of candy and confections in this pack, with The Kate & Berry Sweet Treats Fabricator 3000 able to make all kinds of candy to stock with your baked goods.
In terms of full expansion packs that pair nicely with this one, Get to Work got the ball rolling with the Cupcake Machine, the Cafe Preset, buying retail stores of other varieties, and handling employees. Trying to take a more holistic approach to cooking and sweets preparation? Cottage Living vastly expands your opportunities to run a farm-to-table operation.
We’ve had a few smaller food-centric packs like Dine Out, which focused on operating sit-down restaurants offering menus loaded with all kinds of full meals. Stuff packs gave us things like Home Chef Hustle, which allowed us to open food stands to sell things like pizzas and waffles. Cool Kitchen offers access to tons of kitchen essentials (and ice creams).
You don’t need any of these packs to open and operate a successful bakery in Businesses & Hobbies. While each of the packs mentioned above accentuate the business with their individual additions, the base game skills and items in addition to what’s offered in this expansion contain everything you’ll need to open a bakery!
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Tips For A Successful Bakery
Hire The Best Chefs
Like with real-life bakeries, your best bet for running a successful bakery in The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies is to hire staff with the right skills, and then set their work tasks to focus on all things culinary. By employing Sims with high culinary skills, you’ll craft baked goods that customers are willing to pay a pretty penny to try.
The regular Cooking skill offers plenty of access to baked goods like cakes, cupcakes, brownies, and more. Additionally, there are a couple high-skill options like cheesecakes and tiered cakes available for Sims who’ve broadened their horizons into Gourmet Cooking. The base game skills offer plenty of access to baked goods, enough to open a bakery in the Businesses & Hobbies expansion.
However, if you’re playing with Get to Work installed, you’ll also have Sims who can learn the Baking skill, a much more specialized patisserie option that can really elevate the items for sale in your display cases. Bakers can make items like pies, bagels, breads, souffles, donuts, scones, eclairs, tarts, and more – and the fancier the item, the higher the price tag customers can justify.
Some of these recipes are exclusive to the Whipped Dream Cupcake Factory, from which you can also sell homemade goods directly to other bakeries if you’d like to make a little extra cash on the side of your own business.
While your chefs are busy preparing the day’s case items, you may also want to have someone else around to handle customers, clean the area, and fix any broken items. Not every staff member at a food business needs to be a kitchen whiz, after all!
Display Your Best Goods And Set Fair Prices
You’ll want to set prices based on food quality and freshness, factoring in any pizzazz added after cooking by culinary specialist Sims and the overall quality of the dish prepared. Customers won’t pay much for poor quality goods, but as your Sims’ skills in the kitchen improve, so will the quality of their dessert offers, and so will the price customers are willing to pay for a given item.
In terms of layout, customers need to be able to see your cases, or they’ll have no idea what to buy! After making your items, you’ll need to place baked goods into display cases by using the Stock Surface option. You can also click and drag goods into the case if it’s easier.
If you’re offering a seating area for customers to enjoy their snacks on-site, you’ll want to have ample room for customers to move and relax. You can place chairs indoors and outdoors, and customers may also enjoy having couches, chairs, or desks as well (especially if you’re offering coffee and tea beverages for sale at the bakery, too).
Using the Unit Outlines menu in Build/Buy, you can delegate public and employee only areas, so unless you want your customers strolling into the kitchen and seeing you make their cakes, you may want to set your kitchen area to employees only, leaving the customers out in the public areas to shop and relax.
Finally, you’ll need to ensure your bakery is clean and well-stocked, so delegate employees to tidy up when there aren’t sales to make.
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