This might be a really dumb question, but so far I haven't found information about how to run a bakery. Do you need certain items? Do you need to cook the food? Do you run it like a restaurant or more like a grocery store? I didn't see any pastry-type displays in there.

Thanks for any help; sorry if this is a dumb question but I honestly can't find anything.

EDIT: Also, is there a way to convert a community lot business into a home lot? If my Sim lives in Pleasantville but her business is in Bluewater village, can I put her in the bin, change the lot type to residential, and build her a little apartment above the business?

My sims have started a take away diner. They run it as a home business.
They have a display where they put food which is for sale. They don't have so good cooking skill so they can not make cakes yet. They sell hamburgers and macaroni now, but will sell cakes later when they have learned to bake.

I also placed a few shelves with tea and crackers (deco objects but the sims buy a lot of them)
They don't get spoiled so no need to keep them cold.
The crackers are in brown paper bags and teabags are in boxes. Looks good on the shelf.

If you set up a kitchen on the lot, you can have one of your sims or any one of your employees start baking. The baked goods will go into the owner's inventory just like any other crafted items. Click on the stove or refrigerator and have them make single plates or group servings of whatever you wish. The more cooking skill equals the more options of what they can make in terms of desserts.

You display the foods in the food case and price them using the open for business management tool on the top right of your screen.

Bluewater Village has a bakery in it. If you'd like to get a feel for it before starting your own bakery, play the French family that came with Bluewater Village.

You need OFB in order to run a bakery. It needs to have a kitchen where you bake the cakes, and an area where you sell them with a business register and bakery shelves. It runs like a toy shop.

Also don't go play Adores' or whatever it's called in Blue Water it was obviously designed by a monkey who never even play tested it.

The easy way to play a bakery is place some chiller displays and fill it with game cake. You will need a fix to be able place celebration cakes. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=264660 Some cc cakes can also be displayed and sold. Then you simply restock like you would any other shop.

The next way is do a combo of bought cakes, add some Jello taken right from the fridge while practicing your cooking and learning to bake.

Harder way is all baked goods. Adores comes with a chefs stove which is useless. You need that for a restaurant not a bakery. You need a fridge, preferably two and a stove with an oven (not a uni stove) and counters. Simply make many and the goods go to the owners inventory.

The very hard way. Is use all baked goods but tell them to serve it into slices, grab each one with the hand tool and place it into the owners inventory. This is how Adore's is set up. Add to that a till in-between chiller chases and you have a store designed to make you gouge your eyes out while thumping your head on the key board.

So unless you have a hack (I think there is one) make sure your till is not right next to the chiller cases and use whole cakes not slices. Sims won't sit and eat those slices they go right to their inventory and the leave the shop. If you want customers to sit and eat you will need to place some free cake slices on tables.
I wrote a bakery tutorial on my Live Journal which I would link to, but all the pictures have gone.

You might like this CC
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=163210
It's all decorative but you can sell it anyway. I like it because of the way it makes your bakery look more bakery-ee, especially the bread. Cox's Confections has a big bread rack. I like that little Decrachilll cabinet too.

Fruitsymphony - links?

The deco items I used came from Retail sims, their "OFB ready sets", Tea and herb shop.
http://www.retailsims.com/OFB_Shops...B_HerbShop2.htm
(Retail sims was a goldmine, I downloaded a lot of stuff from their site. There was a variety of tea sorts of course (recolours)

A good way to cut costs in a bakery and save cooking time is to use the Star Trek replicator from SimWardrobe: it makes all kinds of Sim food, even delivery food like Chinese noodles and pizza. It won't put the food in your inventory, though, you'll have to do that manually each time, but you'll have an unlimited supply of free food to sell to your customers at good prices. :D

One of my sims runs a bakery. She has two of the refrigerated food display thingies. One is full of her own baked desserts, and the other has wedding and birthday cakes from the catalogue. She does pretty well from it.

I often have her make some desserts in her off-time whilst at home, usually 5 of each type, and then she's fully stocked when the business opens for the day.

START OFF WITH A SMALL CATALOG OF FOOD.
I can not stress that enough.
My bakery is very successful but I have 16 items (I went a bit download crazy in the food section here) on display--most of which are made from scratch.
As soon as I run out of what I have in my inventory (about 80 baked goods) I'm freaking downsizing to 5 things on display and maybe a small cafe inside -.-
Good luck~

You can do that by cheating I believe, ctrl shift c to make the cheat window open, then changelotzoning residential.

I love this business model. The first version of Heimlichbourg on my old machine had two businesses that sold prepared food. One was a large fish processing plant with a sales floor that sold ready-made group meals. Another family had a huge kitchen at their farm and several cook employees making spaghetti which the family matriarch would then sell at her community lot business. Those two were actually the first businesses I got up and running, since I play nothing is free hoods and that was the only was to free the population from subsistence agriculture. Once the fish plant and noodle maker were in place, my economy could take off, with employees earning wages to buy food rather than growing it themselves.

Simwardrobe's fish and produce packing station mods obviate the need for prepared food stores somewhat, since you can sell crates of produce or fish profitably, which isn't true of selling individual tomatoes - not with employees, anyway. I'm still likely to play them again, though, its a very useful service for busy sims and a great value-added element for your hood's economy if you play economically.

There is a mod somewhere that allows you to make individual servings of desserts, instead of the whole cake. That might be helpful. But I have heard that bakeries are very labor intensive.

Found it! It's by Morague: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=235721

I have a sim who has a bakery as a home business and makes a (good) living out of it. I basically have her bake cakes during one or two days, until she has enough products to fill the display shelves. Then she opens the shop. In order to cut costs, her husband acts as the cashier, while she does the selling.

I didn't find it very expensive to start this business. She uses her home kitchen to bake and only needs an extra room for the actual sale, where I placed a couple of counters, the refrigerated displays and the all-important cash register.

I find that cranking up the environmental score in that room and preventing customers from wandering into other rooms that might be dirty or less aesthetically pleasing are also important.

I'd like to start running more home businesses in general- I tend to emphasize community lots so that other households can visit them- but lately I've started thinking that it damages the economic realism of the hood, since you don't reduce stocks of a good when you buy it as a visitor to another household's community lot business. That decouples production from demand.