Inside Chicago’s microbakery boom: Sifting through inflation and Instagram to make enough dough

A foreboding Instagram post in June warned of Half Birthday’s demise.

“Sign up for a cake before I pass away,” the Chicago-based microbakery advised, captioning a photo of a white cake strewn with wildflowers, a red sprinkle of tart sumac hinting at the sour undertone of the post.

In a comment, baker Alexa Linsemeyer elaborated: Inflation had chipped away at her business’ sustainability, and she needed a break. In late spring, she’d decided “I don’t have it in me to figure this out,” she said.

And she wasn’t alone. When the 2020 pandemic shutdown put restaurant workers out of a job and relegated people to long days stuck at home, baking became a national pastime, and social media use spiked as it became one of the few lifelines to the outside world.

Instagram became the place to order backyard barbecue, homemade jam, and elaborate cakes and pastries studded with seasonal fruit. A push to support down-on-their-luck restaurant workers drove demand to a crop of food entrepreneurs with media savvy and professional pastry know-how.

Some of those early-pandemic businesses have since solidified into semi-permanent operations, becoming full-time jobs for the bakers and cooks running them. And the numbers prove what your Instagram feed suggests: There’s a microbaker boom in Chicago.

After a January 2022 change in state law loosening restrictions for at-home food makers to sell their wares, the Chicago Department of Public Health granted 90 Cottage Food Operation licenses in Chicago in 2022, up from 18 in 2021, and just 14 in 2019 and 2020 combined.

But where there’s a boom, there’s often an inherent risk of a bust. At the tail end of 2022, a spate of Chicago microbakeries shut down, citing rising ingredient costs, burnout and decreasing customer interest. While the cakes remain beautiful, the realities of making them — financial, logistical and personal — are often long-term hurdles for entrepreneurs without the infrastructure that comes with traditional business in an already difficult industry.

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Stephen De Sena, who sells his wares on his Instagram account @mustlovedunks, was furloughed from his job as a legal assistant in March 2020. Full of “nervous energy,” he said, he started baking, drawing on his past work at a pie shop. While he was running a bakery out of his home, De Sena took orders via Instagram messages for a $25 weekly pastry box featuring things such as Chicago dog focaccia and cheesecake with homemade graham-cracker crust.

But the creativity and independence of his full-time baking gig comes at a cost, and lately, he’s felt his already-precarious gig has become ever more unstable. His standing spot in a coffee shop’s pastry case disappeared with a shift in the shop’s plans. And demand on Instagram, De Sena said, fluctuates dramatically; one week he might gross $300, and the next, only $100. Maybe, he worries, customers’ interest in tiny local businesses has waned.

And in an industry so small and tight-knit, one person’s financial difficulties can affect everyone; Bonnie Shultz, who ran the Instagram-based bakery @bon.pastries, remarked, “It was a joke for a little while that (Chicago microbakers) were all just passing around the same $20.”

Shultz was a sign language interpretation student working part time at Urban Canopy, an urban farm on the South Side, when her baking took off. She started selling pastries to raise money for mutual aid projects before friends convinced her she could make a profit. Shultz made curated pastry boxes and stocked a coffee shop’s pastry case.

But working out of her home was a never-ending source of difficulty. For the first year Shultz baked, she had a smaller-than-average refrigerator. She’d cut corners when making laminated pastries to work around her limited fridge space, and had nowhere to store large quantities of staples such as butter and eggs, preventing her from buying them in bulk.

Plus, Shultz shared that fridge with roommates. One of the biggest drawbacks of microbaking, she says, “was all the clanging around at 4 a.m.” She’d run a white noise machine and try to work as quietly as possible so as not to wake up her roommates — a skill not required in a commercial kitchen.

Linsemeyer’s first two years of running Half Birthday were tumultuous.

She’d baked on the side before, making cannabis-laced edibles in college until her customers started asking for the same pastries THC-free. But after months of furlough from her front-of-house restaurant job in early 2020, she started to think she might be able to make ends meet if she sold her cakes.

Linsemeyer loved the work. “It was something that I created fully by myself and for myself, and it was an expression of my artistic vision, and flavors that really resonated with me. Being able to create something completely unique for someone to celebrate — that’s just the best feeling,” she said.

But the financial realities were hard to grapple with. Selling mini-cakes that served two to four people in new flavors every weekend for $25 each, she now estimates she wasn’t breaking even. As Linsemeyer built the business and inflation sent the cost of ingredients skyrocketing, she upped her prices and made larger “celebration cakes” that fed eight to 24 people, and custom cakes that served six to 100.

Linsemeyer moved into a two-bedroom apartment, outfitting the second bedroom with shelving for the 50-pound bags of flour she’d buy at Restaurant Depot. The additional storage helped her buy in bulk, saving her time and money. But the extra bedroom did nothing for the fact that her oven could only hold eight 6-inch pans at a time; even a souped-up rental isn’t the same as a restaurant kitchen.

The sense of freedom was ebbing, with Linsemeyer back to 60-hour work weeks and barely breaking even — a reprise of her years in the restaurant industry.

It wasn’t just the low pay that bothered her, but also the financial distance between her and her customers. Eventually, Linsemeyer passed a queasy threshold: “When I started pricing things higher (than what) I could afford, it made me really uncomfortable,” she explains.

Burned out, Linsemeyer decided she needed either to formalize Half Birthday, open up a bricks-and-mortar shop and hire help; or shut it down. Despite interest from investors, she couldn’t rationalize starting a bakery. “It just isn’t financially viable for me right now to make enough money to be able to pay people what I would want to,” she says.

Linsemeyer was reluctant to jump back into restaurant work as she’d known it pre-pandemic and landed in West Town Bakery’s wholesale department, where she works as a manager. She said she hopes “to have that freedom and a little bit more of the 9-to-5-style thing and still be involved in something delicious and creative and fun.”

De Sena shares Linsemeyer’s dissatisfaction with much of service industry work. The grind of microbaking has begun to wear on him. He’s since scaled back his baking and is looking to get into web development. But even with higher pay and improvements in the climate of the service industry since the start of COVID, he says, “I’m reticent to (get a restaurant job), unless I was pushed into a corner.”

[ Back-aching work. Low pay. No health care: Here’s why Chicago restaurant workers aren’t coming back. ]

Shultz, on the other hand, graduated from Columbia College and got a job as a pastry cook at the West Loop neighborhood’s Emily Hotel after graduation. She credited landing the position in part to her microbaking, but has left the culinary industry and now works as a sign language interpreter. She still bakes, but only for fun now.

In the end, the same things drive microbakers to shutter as drive cooks to quit and owners to close their restaurants: long hours, low pay and shrinking margins.

When Linsemeyer finally decided to temporarily close Half Birthday, “There was a lot of grief and sadness associated with it,” she said. “But with that came a big sense of relief.”

Charlotte Goddu is a freelance writer.