Do you have great culinary skills? Are you thinking of ways of using it to make extra income? Do you know that you can take up cooking as a side hustle?
Cooking as a Side Hustle : Easy Money Making Jobs You Can Start Today
If cooking is something you consider a hobby, you can use it as a way of getting more income. If you are someone who loves food, you can also decide to take up cooking as a side hustle. A side hustle is anything you do that serves as an additional source of income.
Cooking is quite large, there are a lot of side hustles that are food-related. I would be listing some of them, so you can easily select the ones that resonate more with what you love doing. Enjoy the ride.
You Can Write a Cookbook
Yes! It’s a cool way of making money. You may say you are not so much of a good writer. Have you heard about ghostwriting? You can contact a great writer and give him all the details of the recipes you want to be included in the cookbook and he will do all the writing for you. So, you see you don’t have any excuse.
You can sell your cookbooks either in hard copies or soft copies depending on what a customer prefers. One sweet thing about writing cookbooks is that you can keep selling more copies as you update the cookbook with more information.
All you need is to come up with great marketing strategies on how to sell your book and you are good to go. As long as the content in your cookbook is great, you are sure of getting sales. You can even share your experience on social media for more exposure.
You can sell your books on Shopify, Amazon, and other online stores.
You Can Offer Chef Lessons
If cooking is something that gives you so much joy and you don’t mind teaching someone else about what you know, you can gain from offering chef lessons to as many people as possible for and they will pay you in return.
This is a cool way of making money from your culinary skills. You can choose to gather your students physically in your kitchen to teach them or you can teach them via Skype or other online platforms that would be suitable for them to easily learn.
You can also choose to teach them in their kitchen for a great price too. How does it sound? Interesting right?
You can be flexible with your chef lessons. Choose what would be comfortable for you and your students. If your students end up being great chefs, they will certainly refer their friends to learn from you.
You can offer discounts to say, the first 20 people that register. This is a cool way of attracting people to sign up for your lessons. Starting a food side hustle is easier when you already have a following on social media, but it’s certainly not a requirement.
You Can Provide Catering Services for Events
This is another great way of making extra money. If any of your friends are organizing a wedding party, a birthday party, or any small event that will require people to eat, you can hit them up and tell them you can handle the task. Learning how to make money catering may take some trial and error but it is certainly possible.
You can charge them based on the number of plates you would be serving or the quantity of food you would be cooking. You should have a pricing method that your customer would be cool with. Be sure that you are making a reasonable amount of profit from the catering services you intend to provide.
Don’t run at a loss because you are trying to impress your friend. Remember, good side hustles will always make money and shouldn’t cost you money just to do the side hustle.
You can also give referral bonuses to your friends who refer your catering services to their friends. This will help you get clients to patronize you.
You Can Be A Personal Chef
Yes! You can. A personal chef side hustle is a legit way of making money. There are a lot of working-class people who barely have time to cook. You can offer to cook a variety of meals for them in large quantities and get paid in return.
Just be good at what you do and you will get customers who will want you to be their chef.
If you are good at making finger foods, you can inform people about your skills and give them samples too. Finger foods would be cool for students in colleges or kids could take them as lunch in school. You can talk to parents to hire you to provide finger foods for their children.
You can also be a personal chef to an organization. Tell them you will love to work in their kitchen department to provide healthy meals for their staff during lunchtime. A lot of organizations hire personal chefs with great culinary skills to work for them.
You can offer to cook in your client’s kitchen if they permit you to. This will help you connect with them on a personal level. You can as well cook their meals in your kitchen and go deliver them to their homes. This is just one way on how to make extra money as a chef.
Be sure to check out Hire a Chef for more details about using your chef skills.
You Can Create A YouTube Cooking Channel
You can earn by putting up videos about your food business on your YouTube channel. To do that, you need to put up quality content and gain as many subscribers as possible. This is probably the easiest how to make cooking a side hustle and one that you can start immediately.
If you love to talk in front of a camera and you love to share your knowledge with people, then creating your YouTube cooking channel would be a great way of earning from what you are skilled at.
With YouTube Partner Program you can start earning from your YouTube channel as long as you get the required number of followers and watch hours.
You can put up content that teaches people how to cook. You should try to profit from your culinary skills from other means too and not just on your YouTube cooking channel.
If you have written a cookbook, you can talk about how your subscribers can buy it whenever you put up a video on your YouTube cooking channel.
You Can Focus On Food Photography
This is another amazing way of enjoying extra money. Do you have great photography skills? Are you good at capturing high-quality pictures? If you are, start offering your photography skills to people who cook food?
Let your social media pages display the previous works you have done, this will make more people hire your services.
Building a website too to showcase your high-quality pictures is another way of marketing your photography skills. Support your images with reasons why people should hire you.
Put your ability to capture beautiful pictures to use and start earning legit money. And you may want to look into editing photos online as a freelance job.
You Can Provide Meal Planning Services
If you are very good at creating meal plans, you can help people who are dieting and don’t know the right way of combining different ingredients for their diet in exchange for a specific fee.
You can also help those with medical conditions like ulcers and diabetes to keep to their dietary restrictions.
Show them your previous meal plans and how good you are at what you do. They will want to patronize you if they see how well you handled your previous meal planning jobs.
Who Says You Can’t Sell Your Recipes? You Can
You can sell your recipes to people who are interested in buying them. Show people what they stand to gain health-wise if they consume your recipes. Many people love to try out new recipes, they would gladly buy from you.
For those who sign up for your cooking classes, you can also tell them about your recipes, they would be willing to buy from you.
Be sure to come up with healthy recipes, and use great marketing skills to sell them, people will patronize you.
You Can Also Start a Food Truck Cooking Business
You can use your truck to sell your food at events, festivals, or even food tours. Make sure you get permission from the vendor in charge of permitting food vendors to feature at the event or festivals you want to sell your food.
Another way you can sell your food on a food truck is at a stadium or sports venue. Take advantage of large gatherings to sell your food. You can also start by cooking from home to sell and taking to the location using a tent and table.
You can decide to sell during the weekends or weekdays depending on possible locations you can find your target market. Even then you can find easy food to sell to make money.
Ensure your meals are well packaged with high-quality labels on them. Flaunt your log and brand colors on the materials you use in packaging your meals. It is also a way of creating awareness for your cooking side hustle.
You Can Be A Great Cake Maker
People get married almost every day, they celebrate birthdays every day, some other people celebrate various anniversaries and different events that they cherish a lot.
You can offer to make cakes for these set of persons to mark their celebrations and get paid in return.
Always showcase your cake making skills on your social media platforms, fliers and website, so people would be drawn to your brand.
Give discounts to your friends or family members that refer people to patronize you. Don’t underestimate the essence of referrals in your cake making business. It’s a powerful tool that works for a lot of cake makers.
Put out your contact information in your business cards, flyers, social media pages, and website so people can easily contact you for jobs.
I am sure you learned the different ways you can make money from the cooking side hustle. Having an extra stream of income is very important. And putting your culinary skills to good use can help you earn more money.
If your baking skills aren’t that great, then take a course to learn some of the tricks and techniques of the masters! Check out Keikos Pastry Friends to learn how to make some awesome cakes and pastries.
How Do I Start A Food Business From Home?
If you are someone who loves to cook and you enjoy seeing people consuming the good food you made, you could consider starting a food business right in the comfort of your home. There are jobs involving cooking from home as well.
All you will need to start is the right knowledge about how the food business works and know the right things to put in place before starting.
I have carefully compiled a list of things you should consider before starting your food business from home. Check them out.
Select Your Specialty
You need to make up your mind on what aspect of food you want to specialize in. Is it baked goods? Is it catering? Is it delivery services such as Door Dash?
What type of food would you love to sell and how you intend to go about it? Is it going to be an online food business? Or is it going to be offline? Or both? When you decide on which niche you should focus on, you can then go ahead to put other things in place.
Research Your Target Market
Your target market refers to the certain kind of people who you want to provide your cooking services.
In researching about your target market, ask yourself questions like: Do I intend to sell to only those with white-collar jobs? Or do I want to cook for only children or college students? Know the variety of meals your target market likes to consume. Where can your target market be found? You must research your target market so that you can be focused on serving them better always.
For college students, you may want to consider focusing on baking snacks while for those with white-collar jobs, you may want to provide them with healthy, satisfying meals.
Make a research about the price range of the meals your target market pay for. Know how they love to be served. If you do all that, it will go a long way in helping you attract loyal customers.
Also, consider learning from those who are already doing something in your target market. Build on what they are already doing and look for a way of standing out amongst them.
Write a Detailed Business Plan
If you want to have a glimpse into the future of your food business, then you should start writing a business plan for it.
If you need capital to start your food business, creating a great business plan can help attract investors to invest in your food business.
A business plan will help you discover how unique your food business is. If your target market can easily spot your uniqueness, they would be happy to always buy food from you.
You need to come up with a business plan. Apart from it guiding you on how to go about achieving the objectives you outlined, it can also help plan the financial projections you have for your food business.
Now, that you are aware of the myriad benefits of creating a business plan, go ahead and create one. There are various business plan templates you can find online if you have never created one before.
Get Your Cooking Utensils Ready
Do you know one beautiful thing about starting your food business from home? You can start with the cooking utensils you have at home. You will just have to buy bigger cooking utensils to add to what you already have. You might need to purchase bigger cooking pots, big containers where you can store the food you cook, bigger spoons, and other necessary things you would need to prepare healthy meals for your target market.
You will also need to buy ingredients you would need to cook or bake.
Create a Marketing Strategy
Yes! Your food business needs a marketing strategy to be created for it to be successful. Don’t trivialize developing a marketing strategy. It will go a long way in helping you get customers to buy your food.
If you are just beginning your food business, your marketing strategy will help you serve your target market very well.
You can use social media to market your food business. Facebook and Instagram are great social media platforms you can start from. You can also talk to your family and friends about your food business through word of mouth.
You can get your team members to assist you in sharing your flyers to colleges, offices, and residential areas.
Get the requisite documents and licenses that validate your food business.
It is true that you are probably operating your food business from home but fulfilling all the legal requirements for your business is still very necessary. It will save you from a lot of restrictions as to how you want to operate your food business. You will also win the trust of your customers if your food business has the necessary licenses. You will need your food handling permits, tax payments, sanitary permits, business permits, and other necessary licenses.
Work on Getting your Food Business Registered
Get your food business registered by the local authority in charge of registering businesses. If you don’t register your business, you can get imprisoned or fined for not complying with their laws. Do all you can to register your business. Insure your business premises or home against fire insurance.
Get Creative Labels for your Packaged Snacks or Meals
The packaging is very important especially if you are going to be getting them delivered to customers. Do well to get a graphic designer to design very great labels for your packaged foods. Use colors that are catchy for your labels. Creatively display the logo of your business so that your customers can easily remember your brand.
Now that you are aware of the basic things you need before you start your food business, I hope you will get all of them ready so you can stand out amongst others in the food business.
Benefits of Operating Your Food Business from Home
There are a lot of benefits attached to operating your food business from home. If you are a stay-at-home mom or even a young person with a passion for cooking, baking, or kneading, you have a lot to gain from making the best out of what you are passionate about. It’s cheaper to run your cooking side hustle from home.
Below are some benefits of operating your food business from home. Read through and be thankful for the great culinary skills you possess.
You are Free to Determine Your Working Schedule
You are your boss, you can choose to be working only during the weekends or only during weekdays and taking the weekends off.
You determine how many hours you want to put in any you have chosen to work. You can effectively combine your daily house chores as a stay-at-home mom with your food business.
You have anybody ordering you around to work on days that are not comfortable for you. You make the decisions on the specific days you want to operate.
Who wouldn’t want to be free to work on their terms? Nobody. It is very flexible.
Enough Time to Pay Attention to Other Things that Interest You
Operating your business from home will allow you to focus on other aspects of your life. You can even run another business successfully with your food business. You are free to spend time with your family members and friends.
If you are someone who loves to hang out with friends, then operating a food business from home could just be something you would love to try out. You don’t need to have a degree to run a food business. You might just need a few weeks of training to get you started.
It Is Not Very Expensive to Start
You can start with the cooking utensils you have in your kitchen. You will just need more money to buy more ingredients, to print fliers and labels, to buy materials for packaging your food and other vital things. You can get a friend or family member of yours who loves to cook too, to assist you in the kitchen.
Do you see? It’s very affordable. Stop allowing the initial capital involved in starting to ruin your opportunity of profiting from what you love doing–cooking.
You Can Easily Put Your Creativity to Work
You can try out new recipes that you know your target market would be cool with. You are free to be creative with your cooking.
Your creativity can even be displayed in your marketing strategies, or how you package your meals, or even how you relate with your customer when they buy from you.
You Can Attain Financial Freedom From Running a Food Business
Stop looking down on the food business because you think it cannot help you attain financial freedom. If you put in the required work, it will yield positive results that will even help you expand your business.
Maintain a good accounting system for your food business. It is necessary. Make sure you regularly check your books of account to know how you are spending every dime of the money you are making.
You need to be disciplined with your food business money so you don’t end up crashing what you put in so much effort to build.
There are many more benefits of operating your food business from the comfort of your home. I am sure the benefits I listed above will open your eyes to the numerous things you stand to enjoy by operating your food business from home.
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