If you have the baking skill, it helps in unlocking some recipes to cook, otherwise they are greyed out with no way of cooking them. Unlike Cooking and Gourmet where you don't need any fresh produce, baking actually requires it for some of the things there.
i often find levelling out baking as a tedious task, because you can bake everything on offer all the way to level 6 and it stops after this because the majority of the stuff around that level requires produce. Thankfully i can travel to skill classes to pick up the remaining levels with the appropriate happiness moodlet.
outside of Baking, certain produce is required for the grill, like walleye and salmon or a random fish to grill certain fish dishes. produce also reduces the costs on cooking certain dishes as well, however because the costs aren't that high i can just ignore the need for produce.