What legal impediments or hurdles may exist from wanting to begin a very small startup of making fresh baked goods from home? We live in Basel and hope to market via friends and coworkers and fill a niche.

There might be some helpful stuff in this thread about Pie and Cake Bakery.

i too do a little of this but would be very interested to know what feed back you get.
i do it for people having parties ect, but it is all very low key but would love to expand too

I know two people who started this way, both Swiss.
One is very succesful & now gets through about 1,000 kilos of flour in a month.

The other got stuck in a lot of Swiss regulations & is currently hobby baking & giving away the results.

Some key requirements seem to be you are inspected & approved by the people who check on health & safety & the other is that there is nothing in the local zoning regulations that forbid business activities.