To Build a Bakery
is a Craft to Crumb series, sponsored by King Arthur Baking Co., featuring stories of growth for bakeries of all scales. From establishing a first brick-and-mortar location to multiple shops and beyond, the series connects with bakers from across the country about how they’re scaling up their businesses. If you would like your bakery’s story to be considered, please email Annie Hollon at annie@avantfoodmedia.com.
KANSAS CITY, MO — There’s something truly special about the neighborhood bakery. For local customers, it’s an intimate “third space” stocked with from-scratch creations. Working in this type of environment early on was formative for Joanne Chang, and she carried that culture into the creation of Flour Bakery + Cafe.
With 10 — soon to be 11 — brick-and-mortar locations across Boston and a 6,800-square-foot commissary supporting them all, the bakery has cemented its place as a community staple. But businesses don’t earn that kind of repute overnight; Flour’s journey is decades in the making.
Meet the mastermind
While now an established industry professional with several cookbooks and a James Beard award, Joanne never imagined pursuing baking as anything more than a hobby. After graduating with honors from Harvard University, she dove headfirst into corporate life. She had no intention of pivoting until she reached a crossroads in her career.
“After two years of consulting, all my peers were going to business school or staying and growing within their companies,” she said. “I just knew that wasn’t for me.”
She veered left, nabbing a job as garde-manger cook at Biba restaurant. From there, she fell in love with the foodservice industry, and while the hustle and bustle of the back-of-house was exciting, the structure from the pastry bench beckoned.
“I was always hanging out at the pastry station, trying a little bit of this and that, seeing if I could learn a couple new skills and play around with the mixers,” Joanne said. “I really enjoyed creating sweets because almost everybody really responds to pastries, and it was a direct way to make people happy.”
Her career as a pastry chef fell into place from there, beginning at Bentonwood Bakery, a scratch bakery in Newton, MA. After a year there, she landed a job at Rialto, an Italian restaurant on Harvard Square, where she spent two years before moving to New York to join Payard Patisserie and Bistro’s cake department. After a year under the tutelage of renowned pastry chef Francois Payard, Joanne saw an opportunity not only to move back to Boston but also to take her career into her own hands.
“I really wanted to move back to Boston, and that’s when I thought, ‘Gosh, if I move back, then I want to open my own place,’” she said. “At the time, there wasn’t a bakery in Boston that I felt did what I wanted to do, so I said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t exist, then I’m going to see if I can create it myself.’”
The first bud
While working as a pastry chef at Mistral in Boston, Joanne assembled the business plan for her prospective bakery, drawing inspiration from her previous roles. Her experience at Bentonwood, specifically, was a major influence on how she approached Flour. In fact, she reached out to her former boss, Rick Katz, owner and pastry chef of Bentwood, for insight on how to build a business in a similar way.
From there, it was time to find funding. Rather than take out business loans, Joanne opted for investments from family and friends, raising more than $300,000 for the first bakery.
Finding the first storefront took Joanne about two years, during which time she locked down must-have resources and had everything from her contractor to her kitchen supplier ready. Once she signed the lease on space in Boston’s South End, she hit the ground running and opened Flour just three months later.
Growth avenues in bloom
The thought of expanding with a second location didn’t cross Joanne’s mind until years later. Insight from Christopher Myers, her restaurateur husband and co-owner of Flour, outlined that adding another storefront would help keep the bakery strong, opening the door for its team members to flourish further.
“I had an incredible team, many of whom had been with me since almost the very beginning of the first Flour, wanting to grow in their careers,” Joanne said. “Opening the second location allowed them to move up into positions that previously weren’t open to them.”
Joanne and Christopher opened the next Flour location in 2007 … with many more in the years following.
Identifying spots near an anchor location — whether it be a school, museum or hospital — became foundational to locking in future storefronts. For instance, the South Bend shop was in just the right place, boasting a location near residential and business areas as well as a major Boston hospital. Close proximity to public transportation is also a key consideration that’s valuable for customers and Flour Bakery employees alike.
“We want to be accessible to everyone,” Joanne said. “In Boston, there are pretty good subway and bus systems, so we always make sure that we’re close by.”
Years in the making
Since its founding in the early aughts, Flour Bakery + Cafe has come a long way, and Joanne has learned a lot, including the importance of communication.
“You have to be a great communicator to operate a well-run business of any kind” she said. “You’re not a one-person shop. You’re going to have people working for you, and you’re going to have expectations of what their job is and what great performance is. If you don’t communicate that to them, then you have little chance of them being successful.”
To this point, Flour offers several avenues for communication with its team members, including a biweekly newsletter and Flour Forums, a quarterly call with updates on the business and space for leaders to address any questions from team members. The communication of expectations is best seen in the five missions painted on the wall of each and every bakery.
With hands-on experience at various pastry benches, Joanne pulled from past roles to inform aspects such as menu items and equipment, as well as what it takes to work in this industry. She urges those considering opening a bakery to do the same.
“I don’t think you should transition from being a consultant to opening a bakery,” she said. “Just like you wouldn’t operate on somebody or go try a case without having practiced it, I wouldn’t open a bakery without working in a bakery.”
As with all its growth until this point, the future of Flour lies in its next generation of employees looking to grow in the business and in finding new neighborhoods in which to establish roots.
“We don’t have a specific plan to grow again after 11, but we say that after every bakery,” Joanne concluded. “There’s no plan, and then somebody presents an incredible opportunity. If the timing is right, if we have the team members that seem really eager to step up and we’re doing well financially, then we’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’”
