To Build a Bakery is an ongoing series from Craft to Crumb featuring the 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 for the series, please email Annie Hollon at annie@avantfoodmedia.com.
ARLINGTON, MA — Local businesses are the lifeblood of small towns and major metros alike, with retail bakeries often serving as a cornerstone of celebrations and daily indulgences.
For the past five years, Breadboard Bakery in Arlington, MA, a suburb of Boston, has solidified its role as a neighborhood hub, churning out artisan-style breads, sweet goods and savory options.
However, the brick-and-mortar shop had been in the works for much longer, running parallel to the bakery’s owner Daisy Chow finding her footing in the baking industry.
Shifting Gears
Despite her parents owning a restaurant when she was growing up, the food industry was not something she intended to stay in. She got her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2000 and a job in the field soon after. Within a year, however, she decided that engineering wasn’t a fit and returned to what she knew.
“Food has always been a part of me,” Daisy shared, “so I applied for a pastry job at a French restaurant in downtown Boston.”
Daisy quit the engineering gig and began her pastry role that same weekend, serving as the nexus for her entry into the baking industry. A few restaurant jobs later, she found herself at Clear Flour Bread & Bakery in Brookline, MA, in 2004.
“In my mind, it was going to be my last chance at a restaurant job before going back to the ‘real world,’” she said. “I stayed there for 15 years.”
Throughout her tenure at Clear Flour, Daisy found her fit with bread making, partially driven by becoming a member of the Bread Bakers Guild of America in 2005.
“Once I started working at Clear Flour, bread baking clicked with me,” she recalled. “I knew I didn’t want to work in a restaurant forever and make fancy things, it’s just not in my personality. But dealing with bread, hitting temperatures, the repetition of shaping was right up my alley. It took a few years to get to that point, to realize that that was right for me.”
Empowered by her bosses at Clear Flour, she began attending in-person classes and events such as Camp Bread and Wheat Stalk, gaining hands-on experience of learnings she was able to take back to the Boston bakery.
Opening a brick-and-mortar bakery wasn’t Daisy’s initial goal, but when she laid out her options for where her career could go — teach at a culinary school, work for someone else at another bakery or open a bakery of her own — a clear choice emerged.
With a little help from some friends
In the five years it took to find a brick-and-mortar location, Breadboard Bakery was already up and running through pop-ups at a local restaurant, building business through word-of-mouth promotion and social media. Finding just the right spot was a challenge all on its own.
Daisy was meticulous in her search for an ideal location, searching for real estate that was already established for a food business, had essentials like electricity and plumbing all in one place, and the three-phase power needed to operate the workhorses of any bakery: the oven and sheeter.
“I wanted all those things in place without having to pay to have it installed,” Daisy said. “I was looking for a very specific thing within a very specific budget, and that’s why it took me so long.”
Leveraging her network, Daisy was able to take over a former pizza shop in Arlington that was owned by old colleagues from her time at Clear Flour.
“They were looking to leave the business, and it had all these things that I wanted, so it worked out,” she said, noting the reasonable rent and location in the Boston suburbs.
After signing the lease in spring 2019, it was time to find the essentials. Daisy was scrappy in this part of the process, buying secondhand equipment and retaining some of what was left over from the pizza shop.
Securing an oven was another challenge Daisy faced when getting Breadboard up and running. When hope seemed to fade, a liquidation sale at a newly closed culinary school in Brookline, MA led her to the two-deck electric oven that’s still in the bakery to this day.
“I wasn’t expecting to find one used because I kept looking online and wasn’t really sure what I was going to do,” she recalled. “In my mind, I was going to pay a lot of money for a three-deck electric oven but then I found this, which was a little bit smaller. I had enough money on my credit card to pay for it outright, and it was the fastest I spent that much money ever.”
Assembling the store meant leaning on her network, with friends helping move equipment, painting the bakery’s interior and even reupholstering chairs. The shop came together in a little over half a year, officially opening in November 2019.
Kickstarting the bakery
Funding Breadboard was a different challenge altogether.
“Working as a baker for 15 years, you don’t really earn a whole lot of money, and you can get a business loan but it’s really hard to get,” she shared.
While she was eventually able to get a loan, Daisy also funded the bakery with money she set aside from her engineering days and through cashing out her retirement fund.
Daisy also took to Kickstarter to secure funding and tell the story of Breadboard Bakery.
“It got us some publicity before opening, which was nice,” she shared. “Our goal was $20,000 and we got $33,692. The campaign was one month long, and we got 92% funding in the first eight days.”
With backing from peers and members of the community rather than corporate investors, Breadboard Bakery has the freedom to do things its own way. For Daisy, that freedom enables her to test out new recipes that don’t necessarily fall into what is traditionally offered at bakeries.
“If it’s interesting, I want to be able to try it,” she said. “At this point, our regular customers already like what’s coming out of the bakery, so they can trust that whatever we come up with next, they will most likely also enjoy it.”
Paving a path all their own
Through the years, Daisy’s biggest takeaway from establishing the bakery nods to the moral of the classic Aesop fable, The Tortoise and the Hare.
“Slow and steady growth is a good way to make sure you have good customers as opposed to a lot of publicity from the beginning,” Daisy said. “Selling bread is not the easiest thing. Having repeat customers for bread is difficult, but I think we make a really good product, and our customers will buy loaves to share with their friends.”
While some bakery owners might be quick to open multiple locations, Daisy is taking it one day at a time for Breadboard Bakery. Currently operating on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays — a side effect from the COVID-19 pandemic that has stayed to this day — she hopes to slowly ramp up their operating hours at a pace that works for her and her growing staff within the space they currently occupy.
“It is where I want it to be,” she said. “I never wanted my business to be a giant monopoly or anything. It’s just a small business where I can kind of control everything, from quality to being able to know our regular customers by name to being hands-on a lot. What’s the point of opening a bakery if you can’t bake?”
