Understanding The Common Insurance Varieties That Bakeries Need

If you open a bakery, you probably feel excited. You might enjoy baking and hope you’ll become a neighborhood staple. You can hire skilled individuals who will assist you. Your family might help too.

Neighborhood bakeries can do well, but you’ll need insurance for protection. You should get several varieties. We’ll discuss them in the following article.

What is Bakery Insurance?

When discussing bakery insurance, you should first understand the basic concept. Insurance involves a policy or contract that a person or entity takes out. An insurance company provides it. That insurance company gives the policyholder money under certain conditions.

If you injure yourself, that might trigger an insurance payout. If you die, that may trigger a payout as well. You may also get insurance that pays your medical bills.

Insurance essentially means risk management. You can get optional insurance if you like, but as a business owner, such as a bakery owner, you must get certain kinds. Otherwise, you’re violating state law.

Workers’ Comp Insurance

Nearly all employers must provide workers’ compensation insurance. That’s true with bakery owners, and you need a minimum coverage amount for each worker.

As a bakery owner, you get workers’ comp to cover each employee who works in your store. If they hurt themselves while on the job, they can get money through your workers’ comp insurance policy to cover medical bills. They can collect cash for utility bills, groceries, and everything else they need while they’re recovering as well.

In a bakery, injuries happen. Someone can always cut themselves, burn themselves, and so forth. If you have your workers’ comp insurance paid up and ready at all times, your employees should feel better when they come to work each day. That is true with your family members who work in the bakery and your employees who might become like family.

Company Vehicle Insurance

You might deliver baked goods all around the city if you own a bakery. Perhaps you make birthday cakes or cupcakes and deliver them. Maybe you bake bread and supply restaurants with it.

Whatever you make, you probably have company vehicles that you use for deliveries. Your employees likely drive those vehicles. You need company vehicle insurance to cover them when they drive around town.

Company vehicle insurance is also sometimes called commercial auto insurance. When you have it, the policy might cover trucks, vans, cars, or any other vehicles that your bakery might use.

If another vehicle strikes one of your bread trucks during a delivery, the insurance will kick in and cover the damages. You can get a mechanic to quickly repair the truck so it is functional again. That way, you can be back delivering bread and other baked goods again in no time.

If the accident harmed your employee, the insurance can help pay their medical bills as well. If you have a thriving business and multiple vehicles delivering your baked goods and bringing you supplies every day, you can just imagine how valuable you will find this insurance policy.

Work Stoppage Insurance

Sometimes, work stoppages happen in the business world. This certainly happens with bakeries. A work stoppage might occur because there is a natural disaster. Maybe a big storm damages your storefront, and you must close until you repair it.

You might also have supply chain issues. Something you need for your baked goods might be unavailable for a little while.

In these instances, work stoppage insurance comes into play. You can use it to pay the rent on your storefront and similar operating expenses.

The unexpected almost always happens in business at some point, so having this policy makes sense, just like the others. You never know when a work stoppage might halt your revenue stream for a while.

Worker Health Insurance

If you run a bakery, you should give your employees benefits. Those might include paid days off and generous bonuses around the holidays. Those perks will encourage employee loyalty, which you always want.

You should also provide worker health insurance, though. Virtually any employee will ask you about health insurance when they start working for you. Since we don’t have socialized healthcare in America, people use employer healthcare all the time for medical necessities, like checkups and medicine. They also want it so their families can get on the plan.

Purchasing worker health insurance as a bakery owner isn’t cheap, but it’s money well spent. Any employee will like working for your bakery if they know they’ll get excellent healthcare from a reputable national company. The better the policy, the more likely you’ll get the employee loyalty that matters so much.

General Liability Insurance

General liability insurance is also worth mentioning if you’re running a bakery. This is a wide-ranging insurance policy. It covers things like personal injury, such as slander or libel. It covers property damage to another individual’s property. It also covers bodily injuries.

Say that you have an employee delivering bread, and they accidently back into someone on the sidewalk. That person falls and injures themselves. If you don’t have general liability insurance, you must pay that person’s medical bills out of pocket.

A customer might also slip on a wet floor in your bakery. Maybe you advertise a product, and someone feels your ad ventured into copyright infringement territory. Your general liability insurance should cover such incidents or situations.

Running a bakery might mean you become a beloved neighborhood or city fixture. With enough popularity, you may expand and open up a few additional locations. Maybe you’ll deliver statewide or even nationwide if your baked goods catch on. It depends on whether you have larger ambitions or relatively small ones.

In any case, you need the insurance policies we mentioned to stay open and thriving. Without them, you risk your reputation, and the state might shut you down. You protect yourself, your workers, and your customers with these plans, so look into policy costs and get some suitable ones.