WINTERSET, IOWA — Baking is simultaneously art and science. And for Fareway Bakery, a unit of Boone, IA-based Fareway Stores, Inc., chemistry is everything. That can’t be more evident than in the matchup of Sarah Chapman and Amanda Munson, bakery sales specialists.
Sarah and Amanda are about as different as it gets: Amanda is formally trained in food science, while Sarah, a former salon owner, earned her chops making donuts at a bakery down the street.
Before the two joined forces, Amanda was Fareway’s only bakery sales specialist, helping open bakeries throughout the grocer’s network.
When the Cedar Rapids, IA, bakery opened in 2015, Sarah joined Fareway.
“It was one of the easiest interviews I’ve ever done,” Amanda recalled. “We hit it off right away.”
Just two years later, Sarah became a member of the corporate bakery team.
She had bakery experience and an outgoing personality that perfectly complemented Amanda’s scientific mind and propensity for number crunching. But the learning curve was still steep, and there were challenges ahead.
“I already knew how to bake,” Sarah said. “But I had a lot to prove. I had to overcome the perception that I was ‘just a cosmetologist’ with no formal bakery education. I had to work hard at building a rapport with my teams.”
Today, Sarah and Amanda divide their duties based on the bakeries that supply each cluster of satellite stores, each assigned by region.
While each woman oversees her own team — whether it’s working with purchasing to crunch numbers or troubleshooting product development for the I-5 product database — Sarah and Amanda are the yin to the other’s yang.
“We’re constantly learning, and over the past couple of years, it’s become a collective thing,” Sarah said. “We really stand by each other.”
Their collective efforts are expanding Fareway’s bakery presence throughout several areas of the store.
“We complement each other really well,” Amanda said. “Even though we operate our stores individually, it’s nice having a counterpart that you can bounce ideas off of. We both have a good understanding of our business — specifically, what works and what doesn’t — and for the overall program, we work well together as a team.”
The growth of Fareway’s fresh bakery department has been steady over the past five to 10 years, but it was more of a slow burn than a rapid explosion. Before the bakeries took off, many of the stores depended on thaw-and-sell products in lieu of fresh baked goods.
Now, that dynamic is changing. Through the hard work of the bakery teams, Sarah and Amanda are bringing to fruition Fareway’s vision to provide fresh bakery items to all its store locations.
For Sarah and Amanda, it’s about more than just supporting their bakeries to produce the highest-quality fresh baked goods. It’s also about enabling these bakeries to supply those stores with fresh bakery items at the same level of quality.
These two work with store managers to create unique bakery programs that can make their stores successful. And to that end, they say, attitude is everything.
“Whatever they put into it is what they’ll get out of it,” Sarah said. “We can help them create a bakery program that’s something different, something their customers wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. And that’s a huge accomplishment for us.”
The work that Sarah and Amanda do is putting Fareway on the map for bakery. But it’s more than that.
This is a partnership that’s making waves for the company’s growing bakery business. And while having an even division of duties could easily create a rivalry, it’s actually had the opposite effect.
“There’s comfort in knowing that there’s someone else who is fully on the same path that you are, someone who fully understands where you’re coming from and gets it,” Amanda said. “We’re better together.”
This story has been adapted from the December | Q4 2023 issue of Craft to Crumb. Read the full story in the digital edition here.
