How much time it actually takes

The production is not the problem. The selling is, and it lands on the same weekends every year.

The honest hours

A production day for a small batch is most of a day once you count setup, cook, cool, fill, cap, label and cleandown. Call it eight to ten hours and expect the first few to run longer.

A market day is the stall hours plus loading, travel and setup either side, so a five hour market is an eight hour day.

Across a year, a producer running one product and a handful of markets is committing a serious part-time job rather than a hobby.

Where the time goes

Not cooking. It goes into cleandown, which is long and unglamorous; into labeling and packing; into ordering and chasing packaging; into record keeping; and into the administration of accounts that pay in thirty days.

Bottling day is the one that surprises people. Filling, capping, banding and labeling a few hundred bottles by hand is slower than any estimate made before doing it once.

The weeks you cannot move

Pepper harvest, which is a few weeks and does not negotiate. Market season, which is most weekends from late spring to fall. And the run-up to the gifting season if you sell any volume there.

Those overlap with each other and with everything else. The question is not whether you have the hours in a year, it is whether you have them in September.

If you have less time than that

Fewer products rather than fewer bottles. Every additional sauce is another process filing, another label, another inventory line and another thing to explain at a stall, and it does not increase sales proportionally.

And choose one channel properly rather than three badly. A producer doing markets well beats one doing markets, wholesale and online at a quarter of the attention each.

References