The platform built for sharing photos of food is losing the people who actually make food worth photographing. Professional bakers are leaving Instagram in quiet waves, and it’s not because they don’t understand social media, it’s because they understand it too well. What was supposed to help small bakeries thrive has become another exhausting job that doesn’t pay the bills.
I’ll admit, I kind of despise those food influencers sometimes, because honestly, if someone makes pretty food, it’s meant to be eaten … At least that’s my opinion. But I do understand why businesses want you to take photos. Instagram has seen a pretty weird decline in the number of bakers on their platform, and I did some digging to find out why.
I found a couple of big reasons for this decline. One I saw a lot of people talking about: some bakers truly just didn’t have the time. Keeping up with these pages is, in and of itself, its own job sometimes, especially the more you gain popularity.
Have you ever taken a photo on Snapchat multiple different times because you wanted to get the right shot? Imagine that, but it impacts your livelihood. Posts on Instagram have to be near perfect to get any amount of engagement. This perfection can come in many different ways, but the most common way professionals achieve it is through high production values. This includes having a dedicated set to take photos and videos of your product, along with a team of people to maintain the “aesthetic” of the page.
Instagram’s algorithm is very much focused on hyper-edited content. More authentic moments don’t seem to do as well. What I mean is, uploading just a photo from someone’s phone won’t get the proper amount of focus. To succeed in the algorithm, you have to have edited content.
This is a lot of work for some family businesses, and maintaining something like this just isn’t feasible on top of running a bakery for a lot of people. Another thing to consider: for a lot of bakers, this takes time away from them working on baked goods, and this won’t necessarily pay rent. While posting on social media like this can improve your following and get you seen by more people, the effort needed to get proper results can feel like holding down another job.
There’s also a slight disconnect between professional bakers and amateur at-home bakers. A lot of home bakers will normally get promoted to more content on baking, so when they look at the work of people who do better than them or professionals who have years of experience they feel intimidated. But it goes the other way too: some home bakers who have an entire day to spend making a dessert end up being compared to a professional with an actual business to run. Some bakers fear this comparison and choose to simply not engage.
The Instagram dream sold to small businesses was simple: post your work, build your audience, grow your business. But the reality has become much more complicated. Professional bakers are now expected to be photographers, videographers, editors, and content strategists all while actually running a bakery. The platform that was supposed to showcase their craft has instead become another exhausting obligation, one that demands perfection, drains time, and offers diminishing returns.
So when you see a bakery with a sparse Instagram presence or no social media at all, don’t assume they’re behind the times. They might just be choosing their sanity and their craft over the endless scroll. And honestly? That might be the smartest business decision they could make.