When holding any event where food will be sold, there is always the concern of food allergies. An idea I had recently to combat this and also raise more money at a bake sale was to have the bakers include recipes with the items that they baked. Then if patrons are interested in buying the recipes, they can, as well as the homemade food item. Selling recipes can be a very lucrative business, look at all the millions or possible billions of cook books for sale every day!

Another great idea would be to find a local bakery willing to donate the recipe of one of their bakery items, then you could promote your event jointly with them advertising not only the baked goods that they were donating to the event, but that interested parties could also purchase their “secret” recipe. The fact is that many people will give willingly to purchase the recipe, but few are actually ever going to make it themselves. It won’t hurt a bakery to donate and can actually be a great marketing strategy. Such as you see on many shows on the Food Network where a restaurant will prepare a dish showing viewers how to do it, this doesn’t hurt sales because few are going to go to the trouble of making something that they can buy cooked for them.

I’ve designed this free recipe card template in Microsoft Word to make it easy to sell your custom recipes. You can complete all the text fields in the word processing program and save and print as many copies as you need on 4×6 index cards. Even if you decide not to sell recipe cards at your event, having the ingredient list available will be beneficial to those who have peanut, wheat, milk, soy, eggs or other sensitivities.

Download the free recipe card template.