How To Name Your Bakery Brand

Bread and pastries are some of the finest and most important foods in the world. From golden, delicious croissants to divinely flavoured empanadas, baked goods come in a wide variety of shapes, flavours, and textures. 

And if you’re a skilled pastry chef, or talented home baker looking to start your bakery business and bless the world with your delicious creation, then you need to get your business a sweet, catchy, and exciting brand name.

Why? Because, just like flour, your bakery’s brand name holds every part of your brand’s identity together. Getting inviting names like Huckleberry, Sticky Fingers Bakery, and Sugar Momma’s Bake Shop & Cafe can set the tone for your bakery and attract tons of potential customers.

So, whether you plan on running a bakery cafe, a food truck business, or a dine-in bakery, we will show you three vital steps for creating mouthwatering brand names.

Three steps to creating a delicious name for your bakery business

1) Build your ideal brand persona

What truly makes great bakery business names are the feelings they communicate when we hear them. But, before you start searching for names that’ll evoke feelings of luxury or nostalgia, if that’s what you’re hoping for, you need to create a comprehensive brand persona for your business.

Think of your brand name persona as a detailed analysis of what you want from your brand name, from its tone, length, and meaning to how it aligns with your bakery brand’s mission, vision, and goals.

If you want to build a successful bakery business, you must get a memorable name that sets the tone for your business and makes it easier for your brand to arouse customer expectations and create a wholesome experience in their minds by connecting your delicious pastries to fun memories.

And the path to creating such an evocative name begins with creating your business plan, knowing as much as possible about your target customers, local market trends, and your bakery’s unique value proposition.

2) Brainstorm bakery name ideas

The best food business name ideas are very rarely stumbled upon; instead, they’re intentionally created, with love, of course. 

And just like a great artist working on a fine piece of art, to get the perfect brand name, you’ll have to literally shut the door to your studio and get to work finding the best name for your bakery. 

Finding the perfect name is a fine balance between the rigidity of brand naming principles, the spontaneity of creativity, and the time it’ll take for both to come together. 

So, grab any writing material that isn’t covered in flour and write down the core values of your brand, the kinds of pastries you’ll be offering, and your business’s personality. Doing this will make it easier for you to find metaphors or adjectives that reflect the business you want to build.

Yes, brainstorming can take anything from dozens to hundreds or even thousands of hours. However, the naming tools listed below can help you or your team find the best name quickly. 

• Thesaurus
• Visual names
• Bakery slang words
• Rhyming words
• Brand name generator 

Your ultimate goal at this stage is to gather as many names as possible. How many? Gather as many as 200 words. It doesn’t matter whether the words on your first list are mouthwateringly awesome or just downright dry and brittle. 

Getting as many names as possible will provide you with many resources to work with as you begin validating the names on your list.

3) Validate your name

Just as we all need warranties and validation before making any significant purchase, you must also get your potential business name validated. If you skip this part, you could be pushing your business into mistakes with dangerous legal and financial consequences. 

Here are some quick ways to validate your brand name. 

• Audience testing: Ensuring you have the perfect bakery name your customer will love should be your most important priority. And the best way to know you’ve got it right is by directly finding out from your customers. Use surveys and questionnaires to get your customers’ opinions, especially those in your target demographic or communities. Do your best to understand how your customers see your business and endeavour to position your brand to match their expectations. 

• Check the domain is available: Don’t ignore securing the domain name of your business because, without it, your business will be left digitally vulnerable. Try to get the “.com” or other high-level domain extensions for your business, as these will bring your business more traffic.
• Trademarking: Getting a trademark with the USPTO legitimizes your brand name in the eyes of the law and keeps other businesses from using your name or any other elements of your brand identity. 

However, the process is tedious and very time-consuming, so be prepared to hire a trademark attorney, so you can concentrate on making your business better. 

Stay focused on branding

To build a successful bakery business, you must realize that your products, promotions, and brands are all tools that will help you succeed. However, what determines your success is staying focused on cultivating the best brand identity that’ll make your customers return for more.

Grant Polachek is the head of branding at Squadhelp.com, a 3X Inc. 5000 firm that specializes in providing expert brand naming services. As the top-ranking platform for finding the best company names, they’ve evaluated more than one million potential brands and compiled an impressive list of effective and distinctive business names, including several Fortune 500 companies and start-ups.