Cook For 1 to 200 and Make Money at It - Part 2

What is your comfort zone when cooking? Let's review:in part one we discussed several low cost to start options. Take home a chef, where you hire yourself out to take or cook a meal at someones home. The second topic was a hot dog cart or grill and cart selling at a busy spot. Another option was making pastries or something special for a restaurant. The last topic was using your home as a restaurant.

Let's first explore catering. Catering can be anything from cookies for a kids birthday party to an office gathering to a wedding for several hundred people. What you are willing to take on is up to you. Depending on the scale of your endeavor, you need to be aware of safe food codes and liability. It is well within a cooks ability to set up several roasting pans to serve a group of ten or twelve. With careful planning some of the food can be prepared before and heated to serve. If taking on a larger project doesn't scare you, then some help and laying out the project would make it smooth sailing. Catering can be very profitable and fun.

Wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional wedding cake have really taken off. One thing that makes cupcakes so great is the versatility in design and decorations. The bride and groom are not stuck with just one basic cake. Depending on the amount of cupcakes, there could be a huge variety of cake flavors and decorations. If you are already set up to do cupcakes, you could expand your market to include kids party cupcakes. Adult parties could be a possibility. Instead of a dozen roses for an anniversary, how about a dozen cupcakes in the favorite flavor. Wedding cupcakes are not just for weddings any more.

Do you want your own place of business? A coffee shop is one of the less expensive ways to go. You could set up a delivery coffee business for usually a lot less money than a brick and mortar business. If your sights are set on that coffee shop on the corner or in the mall, than go for it. Let me qualify that last statement! To succeed you must do your homework! If you don't plan for everything, the things you didn't plan on will come back and bite you. For example, if there have been 3 coffee shops in this one location and they all closed. You need to dig down and find out why they didn't make it. You don't want to be number 4! It's very satisfying to tell someone that you own the coffee shop.

Do you like the idea of having a mobile food business? There are several options. Start small with a van with donuts, pastries and coffee delivered to various offices and shops. A larger version could have sandwiches, things like yogurt, a variety of drinks and even lunch items. If your sights are set on a larger venue then a large trailer or motor home might be what you want. These can be set up as cafeterias, short order grills or parked at fairs as concession stands.

In part three of this series we will look at more non-traditional ways to make money from cooking or baking.

Cook For 1 to 200 and Make Money at It - Part 2

Party Food Ideas