Questions to ask before an agency markets your bakery

Mid-January is the one stretch of the year when most bakery owners have time to take a sales call. The holiday orders are picked up, the case is selling slowly while customers keep their New Year promises, and Valentine’s boxes are still a few weeks out. It is also when agencies call.

Most of those pitches could be sent to a dentist with the nouns changed. A bakery is not a dentist. It sells two different things, the walk-in case and the planned order, and the planned order is where the money and the mess both live. Here are the questions we would want a bakery owner to ask any agency, ours included, before signing anything.

How would you handle the orders that are placed weeks ahead?

The walk-in customer decides in the moment. The person ordering a birthday cake, a dozen boxed cookies for a classroom or a wedding tier decides days or weeks before the pickup, and they reach you by phone, by Instagram message or through a form if you have one.

A good agency asks to see how those orders arrive today before it talks about ads. Listen for questions like these:

• How many custom inquiries came in last December, and how many became paid orders?
• Where do the dates, servings and deposits get written down?
• How long does a message sit before someone answers it on a Saturday?

If nobody asks, the agency plans to send more people into a process that already drops orders. More inquiries into a DM inbox is just a longer list of people waiting for an answer.

What would you change on my Google profile first, and why?

The map is where “bakery near me” and “birthday cake near me” get decided, so any agency should have an opinion about your Google Business Profile before the first meeting ends. Ask for specifics.

Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, published in November, asked local search experts to rank what moves the map pack. They put a physical address in the city of the search fourth and an address showing on the profile seventh. Being open at the time of the search came fifth. For a bakery that closes at 2 pm, or sells out by noon, that last one is worth a real conversation about hours, special hours and how you say “we sell out early” without looking closed for good.

A home baker without a storefront usually lists as a service-area business, which means giving up those address signals. An agency that understands the trade will say so plainly and plan around it, rather than promising you the same map results as the shop on Main Street.

What will you claim about my food, and who checks it?

This one catches more agencies than any other. Captions like “nut-free”, “allergy-friendly” and “gluten-free” read as friendly marketing copy. They are claims.

The FDA’s allergen labeling questions and answers (Edition 5, January 2025) say allergen-free claims must be truthful and not misleading, and that a product carrying a “may contain milk” statement should not also say “milk-free”. For gluten, the FDA’s 2013 rule sets “gluten-free” at under 20 parts per million, and the agency recommends that menu claims meet the same definition.

The same FDA guidance draws a line most owners have never heard of. Federal allergen labeling covers food a retail business packages and puts out for sale, such as pre-boxed cookies on a shelf. It does not cover food placed in a box in response to a customer’s order, such as a cake boxed at pickup. Since January 1, 2023, sesame has been one of the allergens that must be labeled on packaged food.

Ask who writes the captions and who checks them against what your kitchen can guarantee. The right answer involves you.

How would you get me more reviews?

Ask this directly and listen for the word “free”. Google’s content policy bans offering payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for any review, positive or not. A free cupcake for a review breaks it. The FTC’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, in effect since October 21, 2024, adds penalties for incentives that depend on the review being positive.

The honest answer is boring: ask every customer after pickup, with a direct link, and reply to every review in your own voice. An agency that offers a faster route is offering you risk.

If I bake at home, do you know my state’s cottage food rules?

Many bakers start under a cottage food law, and the rules shape the marketing as much as the kitchen. Two states show how much the rules differ:

• Texas raised its cottage food limit to $150,000 in annual gross income under SB 541, effective September 1, 2025. The Texas Department of State Health Services page says the label must include the statement that the product was produced in a private residence not subject to governmental licensing or inspection, and any major allergen used. For online sales, that label information must be posted before the baker accepts payment, and the baker, an employee or a household member delivers the food in person.
• Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services caps cottage food sales at $250,000 a year, allows website and mail-order sales, and says cottage products cannot be sold wholesale.

An agency need not be your lawyer, but it should know that pitching a Florida home baker to grocery buyers is a mistake, and that a Texas baker’s checkout page has to show the label first.

What would the first report show?

Ask to see a sample report before you sign. For a bakery it should count things you recognize: calls from the profile, direction requests, custom inquiries by source, preorders by holiday, and reviews gained and answered. Platform charts full of impressions tell you very little about whether the Valentine’s boxes sold out.

On paid search, ask what the agency expects a cake inquiry to cost and where the number comes from. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks put the median Google search cost per lead for Restaurants & Food at $30.27, from data running April 2024 to March 2025. That is a market median, not a promise, but an agency quoting a number with no source is guessing.

What to do this month

• Write down how custom orders reached you in November and December: phone, messages, form, counter. Count them if you can.
• Set the Valentine’s order cutoff and pickup days now, and put them on your profile and your site before the first message asks.
• Reread every caption and menu line that says “free” of anything, and change any claim the kitchen cannot guarantee.
• Check your profile hours against when the case actually sells out, and add special hours for any closures already on the calendar.
• If you bake at home, open your state’s cottage food page and check your label, your product list and how you deliver.

The agency worth hiring will want to start with the order path and the profile before the ad budget, because that is where a bakery’s planned orders are won or lost. Our bakery page shows how we approach it, and the questions above apply to us as much as to anyone else.