Menu Planning For my Bakery/cafe

May the lord help you and look down on you.

Teach them

1)  Food sanitation

2)  Weights and measures and conversions

3)  Equipment and workplace safety

4)  How to cook

Then talk about menu planning.

Pretty much what Kuan suggestions, and what Ed suggests.

-Never take on more than two at a time. (potential mental health issues)

-Explain the use of the scale, and it's benifits.

-Show them how to sweep and mop a floor, then get them to make an illustrated poster and instruction sheet for the next students.  I'm not kidding about this.

-Show them how to fill and operate a d/washer, how to scrape plates/utensils clean, and get one of them to make a poster and illustrated instructions for the next batch.

Before you get them to operate a mixer, go to your local Worker's Comp. Board and get some "scary photos" of what kind of damage a 20 qt mixer can do to your arm/wrist, if you get it or hair/clothing caught in the mixer.  When they do operate it, watch  them like a tow trucker drivers looks at his watch at 2:55 pm,..... 

-Get them to bring their "favorite recipie" in.  Ask them for a suggested sales price, then give them a stack of old supplier's invoices and ask them to cost out their recipies.

-Make sure they make lots of cookies, It's somethig fairly simple and almost foolproof and gives them a lot of satisfaction.  They gotta have fun too.....  

I'll reorder 2 and 3, but honestly, the best thing you can teach a person coming into a restaurant is food sanitation.  My first job at McDonalds, I had a good management staff, and food safety (and "if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean") taught me my most valuable lessons. 
 

Now, as far as menu choices, what do YOU want to accomplish?  In my mind, until you define what type of food you're going to serve, you really can't define your restaurant.  The other school of thought is to define your restaurant, then work within the limitations you have.  A lot of this comes down to whether you're doing a build out of an empty space or taking over an existing commercial kitchen.  The types of food you can prepare are limited by the kitchen equipment available.  There are a lot of pizza joints cooking buffalo wings in an oven, which, IMHO sucks.  However, they do this because they have a pizza oven, not a fryer.  Likewise, if you don't have a pizza oven, don't serve pizza. 

There are a million different things you can make in a bakery, but will your bakery be geared toward bread products, cake products, or pastries?  Once you define your general direction, then you can start looking at specific items.  I tend to gravitate toward how Mexican restaurants operate.  They have beef, chicken, rice, and beans.  From those ingredients, they can have 40,000 different menu choices.  Of course, I'm over-simplifying, but they truly do seem to have a few standard ingredients, wrap them in a different type of tortilla shaped a different way and then they've got a full menu with very few actual main ingredients.
 

McDonalds is a total system package. It is almost idiot proof, just do everything when the bell rings or when the light goes on. In a Mac you are not allowed to think, as we all think differently and this will mess up the final consistency of the product.; I often sited  McDonalds  as an example of great operations and strategies when I was teaching school. Few companies have the resources to do what they did. If they got out of food business and went into the furniture business, I feel in a short time they would be the biggest and best in the world based on their think tanks and management style.