Love to cook? Love simoleons? Learn how to make simoleons from cooking!

Stuff packs are back from the grave and the latest stuff pack, Home Chef Hustle, offers new ways to start a Sims 4 chef business! Prepare tasty waffles, pizza, and focaccia bread with freshly prepped ingredients using the new waffle iron, pizza oven, and stand mixer. Then break out the new food stand and start selling your delicious creations on your own terms!

We’re going to show you how to start your own Sims 4 chef business with Home Chef Hustle!

Start Your Sims 4 Chef Business!

The best part about starting your Sims 4 chef business is that it’s YOUR business. That means you work when you want, where you want, and how you want. No schedules, no daily work tasks, no boss breathing down your neck or work rivals, and you never need to worry about getting laid off.

All it takes is some cooking skill, a few handy appliances, a food stand, and some good business sense and you’ll be on your way to creating your own home chef hustle!

Stock Up on Inventory

Of course, you can’t run a food business without any food to sell! So before you set up your food stand, spend some time in the kitchen cooking. It’s your business so you decide what you want to make and sell. Have a deep love for just waffles or just pizza? Specialize in what you love and run a waffle stand or a pizza stand. Or prepare and sell a variety of dishes. It’s up to you.

The new stand mixer will be your best friend when it comes to running a Sims 4 chef business. This nifty gadget makes 5 servings of prepped ingredients from just a single ingredient so you get more bang for your buck. It also eliminates the prep time when cooking which will make restocking go much faster. Prep all your ingredients beforehand so you can keep turning out more food quickly during a sale.

Invest in a Food Stand

Once you have a nice stock of food prepared, it’s time to invest in a food stand! You can find the Anywhere Any Fare Food Stand in the Build/Buy catalogue for 585 simoleons. Place it down on any lot that your Sim owns and it’s yours!

But the food stand doesn’t have to stay on your own lot. This handy object is portable! Drag it around anywhere you want and put it in your inventory to take just about anywhere! You can plop it down wherever you are to start selling your cooked dishes and raking in that dough. We took our food stand to a café and sold our food on the patio and to the local park.

If you’re running food sales at home, you might want to block the doors to your home with a large object Sims can’t get through or temporarily delete the doors. Even when we locked our doors, customers still wandered through our house during a food sale. And if you’re running a food sale on a public lot, make sure your Sim owns the stand. If you try to use a stand that’s already on the lot, Sims will just steal all your food without paying for it.

Now that you know how to get and place a food stand, you should probably know how to operate it. The food stand is where you control most of your Sim 4 chef business. You can brand your business by giving it a name, mark up the prices, equip it with small appliances, clear and stock the table, start food sales and tend the table during a food sale. By default, your Sims will automatically restock the table with anything in the table’s inventory during a food sale but you can disable this if you find it annoying. You can also put the food stand in your inventory to pack it up and set up shop somewhere else.

Set Up Shop Anywhere

So you have the food and the food stand. Now what? Take your food stand and food anywhere you want to set up a Sims 4 chef business and start selling your food!

Drag the food stand out of your inventory and place it down anywhere you think you can make money. Then drag all the food you have to the table and any small appliances. The food stand can hold two small appliances. When you drag food to the table, it will disappear but don’t worry! It’s in the table’s inventory which is exactly where it’s supposed to be. And don’t worry about stocking the table with too much food, either. Any extra food that can’t fit on the table will just stay in the table’s inventory until there’s space on the table for your Sim to restock.

Once you have your table set up and stocked with food, start a food sale by clicking on the food stand. Starting a food sale will start a mini-event where potential customers will spawn on the lot to browse what you have for sale. Make sure you actually tend the table during the sale event if you want to turn a profit.

For best results, we recommend setting up your Sims 4 chef business in highly populated locations during the daytime hours between 8am-8pm. Sims will spawn to browse your stock no matter where you are but you can boost the number of customers by enticing Sims who are already there, too. We found that our food stand was busiest during the day. After 8pm, business started slowing down and after 9pm, we had almost no customers showing up.

You’ll be able to see exactly how much money you made and how much you sold at the end of a food sale. This information is extremely helpful because it can show you what types of dishes are popular with customers and what dishes are making you the most money. This can help inform your decisions when it comes to what you want to sell in future sales for your Sims 4 chef business.

Be a Smooth Talker

While you are able to just sit back and let customers make purchases on their own, you can boost your sales by being a smooth talker. Your Sims 4 chef business will really take off if you know how to give a good sales pitch and be convincing.

During a food sale, you have the option to Give a Sales Pitch and Convince to Buy on any customers perusing your culinary wares. They are easily found in the social menu because they aren’t under any category. Your Sims can Give a Sales Pitch as many times as they want but there is a cooldown period of about 1 in-game hour for the Convince to Buy interaction.

Giving a Sales Pitch can increase the odds of that Sim making a purchase if they’re receptive to the pitch. In our experience, you should use this as often as possible on as many customers as possible even if the customer rejects the sales pitch sometimes. Having a sales pitch rejected didn’t seem to negatively impact our sales in any way, but making successful sales pitches boosted our sales. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by giving sales pitches!

The Convince to Buy interaction is a very powerful sales tool for your Sims 4 chef business, which is why it has a small cooldown period. With this interaction, you can convince a customer to purchase a specific dish. This means you have the power to make someone buy the most expensive item you have available. This interaction doesn’t always work, but it’s still worth using whenever it’s available.

Restock, Restock, Restock

However, don’t worry too much about constantly making sales pitches during a food sale. The best part about running a Sims 4 chef business from the food stand is that you can multitask! Even when you can’t deal directly with customers, you will still make sales as long as you are tending to the table with a food sale event active.

And while you’re tending the table, you’re able to focus on other aspects of your Sims 4 chef business at the same time. Like restocking! If you have prepped your ingredients beforehand with the stand mixer and have some appliances at the food stand with you, you’ll be able to quickly cook up more delicious food and stock the table with it when you start running out during a food sale! No need to close up shop to do more cooking. You can do it on-site while you’re running a sale which is incredibly handy!

With auto-restock enabled, all you’ll need to do is drag the food to the food stand and your Sim will automatically put it out for purchase when the food stand has room for it. If this setting is disabled, you’ll have to do all the stocking manually. Some players might prefer this in order to have greater control over their Sims 4 chef business but we found the auto-restock feature to be a big help and highly recommend it!

Don’t forget to mark up your prices, too! By default, you’ll be selling at a 0% markup, which means you’re selling at cost. If you are sourcing all the ingredients yourself, you can still make a good profit off of selling at cost since you are not paying for the ingredients. However, if you’re purchasing your ingredients, you’ll want to make sure you’re selling at a higher markup in order to turn a profit.

Be careful not to get too greedy! Your Sims 4 chef business will suffer if you price your food too high as customers will be more reluctant to buy it. It’s important to strike a balance so that you are still making steady sales at a good profit.

Want to earn satisfaction points from your Sims 4 chef business as well as simoleons? Check out our aspirations guide!