My Personal Side Hustle Making $800/day Selling Waffles

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TLDR;

• Gluten Free Belgian Waffle Stand

• Made up to $800 a day

• Also had a full time job

• Built up to 6 locations

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I’ve seen a few folks talk about running food hustles and businesses, figured I’d share what my experience was running a Belgian waffle stand for a year.

Background:

• This was a Gluten Free Belgian Waffle stand

• I was working full time when running this

• I had some friends running it when I wasn’t able to

This was back in 2018 so I’ll have to estimate some of the details and numbers.

p.s I was able to find the old Instagram for the biz WAFL 😆 

Getting My First Customers

I grew up in Belgium where waffle stands were super common, I knew how to make them and I knew people liked them.

I began experimenting with recipes (mostly different flour and butter types) and gave waffles to friends and co-workers (best colleague ever??) for them to tell me which types they liked.

I didn’t share what the recipes were but told them if they preferred Waffle A, B, C etc. What I didn’t plan on happening was that folks liked the gluten free recipe the most, which worked well for many reasons. Many people said its the best waffle they ever had 🥹.

I asked them to tell me what they would pay for a waffle like this and most said between $5-$8.

This was enough to make a business plan and I went to work.

The Farmers Market

There’s a ton of farmers markets in my area so this seemed like the best way to get started.

“Go where the customers are”

I went to several markets only to discover they are mostly all run by the same company. I found the market manager and was relentless in my pursuit. This is important 🚨 

He told me no multiple times, said they didn’t have space, I was too young in the biz, etc. I took this as a challenge.

I finally delivered him and his crew a fresh batch of waffles and he was sold.

This gave me a couple of months to become legit:

• Set up an LLC

• Order marketing materials

• Set up socials

• Order equipment, etc

I ended up selling between 25 and 60 waffles a day at the market which is about $200-$500/day.

My expenses were about $200/day to run a stand.

Side note: Since these were gluten free, I stumbled into a Celiac influencer (wild) and he promoted me on his socials with over 500k followers 😳 

More Locations

The market was a solid start but I needed more sources of income. I noticed a bunch of breweries had food trucks outside, so I started there.

All of them wanted in, so I added 3 breweries to the list and was now operating 4 times a week.

Breweries locations made about $200-$300 a day so it wasn’t great.

But what do waffles go really well with? COFFEE ☕️

So I reached out to some coffee roasters and was able to land 2 more spots.

Coffee roaster locations made about $500-$800 a day, which is really great.

So now I was operating 6 locations, which meant I was going 6 days a week, while working full time OOF 😅 

The Burn

Being so new to this, I didn’t know how to scale, remove myself from the business or even how to cope with all that work. I was burned out.

I started missing days at locations and eventually folded the business even though it was making money (instead of quitting my job)

So my takeaways are this:

• Be ready for the grind

• Have a number in mind that will make you quit your job or keep it small enough so you don’t get burned out

• Go to where the customers are and then double down there

• Seek help for how to scale and manage people (instead of toughing it out yourself)

• Stick to it, and don’t quit unless you really really have to!

p.s If you found this insight into the food business world valuable, imagine how helpful it could be to someone else dreaming of starting their own hustle!

Hit the share button below to pass this on to a friend, colleague, or anyone who's ever thought about turning their passion into profit.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

This was really hard work but super rewarding and fun. Food business is tough and a lot less sexy than it looks. But once you get a loyal fan base (like CRUMBL) you can make some serious cash doing this.

Hope this encourages anyone to get their food business started ASAP!

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋