One undeclared allergen reaches everybody who bought that batch.
We cover bakeries and cake businesses: product liability with allergens at the center of it, the ovens and refrigeration, and the stock they hold.
Tell us the situation.
One licensed human replies the same business day — not five agents, not an auto-responder. If the policy you have is already the right one, we will tell you.
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Send us what you have. We’ll tell you if it’s right.
Your current policy paperwork, a renewal notice, or nothing at all. A licensed agent reads it and replies the same business day.
What bakery businesses actually need.
Product liability
Illness or reaction from something you baked, including allergen exposure.
Without it — An undeclared allergen is the most common food claim there is.
General liability
Customer injury in the shop.
Without it — A retail counter is a public space with a wet floor behind it.
Equipment breakdown and spoilage
Ovens, mixers, proofers and refrigeration, plus the stock lost when they fail.
Without it — Property excludes the machine breaking itself, which is how they break.
Business income
Income while you cannot bake.
Without it — A single oven failure can stop production entirely in a small bakery.
Product recall
Withdrawing a batch already sold or supplied.
Without it — Excluded from liability coverage, and needed the moment you supply wholesale.
Crime and social engineering
Stock and takings going missing, and the ingredient invoice paid to a fraudulent account.
Without it — Paying an invoice from a supplier whose bank details changed by email is not burglary. Property coverage will not pay it, and the social engineering sublimit has to be asked for by name.
Group health and benefits
Bakers who start at four in the morning and know your formulas.
Without it — The hours are the hard part of hiring, and the person who has already adjusted their life to them is the one worth keeping.
A bakery near our office grew from nothing to $3 million in revenue in a year and found itself paying north of $50,000 a year for workers compensation. Every dollar of payroll was being reported as bakery production, even though the front of house just took orders and made coffee.
We helped them split the payroll reporting so that the counter staff were rated at the much cheaper class for what they actually do, which was about half the labor. The cost fell by almost 50% overnight. A workers comp bill is only as accurate as the payroll behind it, and a business that grows fast reports the way it did when it was small.
What our bakery clients ask us.
How serious is the allergen exposure really?
It is the leading cause of food recalls in the United States, ahead of pathogens. For a bakery the realistic scenarios are ordinary rather than dramatic: a supplier changes a formulation without telling you, a shared mixer carries traces between batches, or a label does not match what went in. That reframes the risk as a documentation and process problem — supplier specifications, changeover procedures and label control — which is exactly what an underwriter will ask about.
We sell to cafés and shops as well. Does that change things?
Yes, substantially. Wholesale multiplies the number of people reached by any single batch and brings your trade customers’ contracts into it. Most will require you to name them as an additional insured with a stated limit. It also makes recall coverage meaningful in a way it is not for a purely retail bakery: pulling product from twenty stockists is a real exercise with real cost, and the liability policy does not fund it.
I bake from home under a cottage food law. Am I insurable?
Yes, and you need to be, because a homeowners policy excludes business pursuits entirely. A customer made ill by something you sold is not a homeowners claim. Cottage food laws permit the activity; they do not insure it. Commercial policies for home-based food businesses exist, are inexpensive, and are also what farmers markets and craft fairs ask for before giving you a stall.
Also in this family
Commercial insurance is 96% of what we do — it is not a department here, it is the whole business. Not ready to talk? The guides answer the questions this page raises in more depth. Already insured with us and need a certificate or a policy change? Ask the service team rather than starting a quote — it is faster and it goes to the people whose job it is. We also write home and auto, which is usually cheaper alongside the business policy than apart from it.
Handed a lease, a vendor packet or a client contract with insurance requirements? Paste it into the COI Requirements Decoder to see what each one means for your business, or read what the requirements mean.