Emily Dubner, BakingForGood.com

Emily Dubner leveraged technology and outsourcing to start an online bakery. Excerpts taken from an interview with Entrepreneur Magazine:

Leaving a cushy management consulting job to become a fledgling online baker may seem half-baked, but Dubner had previously drafted a business plan for a storefront bakery–a plan she stashed away when the recession hit.

But the downturn made her prospects at the firm murky, and an online bakery requires much less overhead than a storefront. So Dubner acted on her idea. She partnered with a bakery in Hermosa Beach, Calif., that could handle the volume she anticipated–an impossible feat from the home base of her New York City apartment. And she’s still using her treasured family recipes.

“I used my down time when traveling for my previous job to taste goods from bakeries around the country,” she says. “The products from this baker were the most delicious I had tried.”

There’s such a great tradition of using baked goods as a way to raise money,” she says. “Since everything is online these days, I began to think about what a bake sale would look like if it was brought online.”

It would look like BakingforGood.com, the company she founded in September, within a few months of her mother’s special delivery. The concept is simple: Buy baked goods and support worthy causes.

Fifteen percent of every purchase (exclusive of shipping) goes to one of 100-plus nonprofits the buyer selects. Dubner expects those charitable contributions to add up to more than $20,000 by the end of the year.