I think we've got enough going on with getting the bakery off the ground that it's time start sharing updates a bit more regularly now. I was thinking I was going to try and write posts that were a bit polished, but after a brief consultation with my editor (that would be Ashley), I'm going to roll out these posts as simple updates on what we've been up to, in no particular order 😆

On the Cottage Food Bakery front, Ashley and I completed our required food handling training for Boulder County a few week's back. There are not many requirements for starting a business out of your home under the Colorado Cottage Food law, but this was one we needed to knock out that was at the top of the list. Ashley scored 100% on the final test, whereas I only got a 93%, so you may want to check who made your baked goods when the time comes. Never let them tell you I'm not honest.

Ashley had been trying to find a local account that we can use for our businesses. Not an easy a task as you might think, and that was even tapping into a few referrals. I think we are pretty close to wrapping the vetting process up though. On the plus side, we've already got a great bookkeeper to lean on, which would be in the form of my sister who has been following us along on a couple of our entrepreneurial adventures over the past several years.

When it comes to professional services and contractors, we always start here in Lafayette and then work our way out. We definitely like to work local when we can. 

In order to bake at any sort of scale, you need ovens that are a bit bigger than what we all use in a standard home kitchen. Fortunately there are a handful of companies that make ovens that are not quite the large, multi-deck ovens you see in a full scale bakery. They are big enough to bake larger batches of baked goods, but small enough to find a cozy spot in your home. The companies making these smaller to mid-sized ovens were typically only available from a few companies overseas, and there there were already long wait times to get your ovens. 

The pandemic, supply chain issues aside, led to a bit of a renaissance with cottage bakers starting up little bakeries out of their homes that started buying up these niche ovens. Unfortunately, that bakery spike and, circling back to those supply chain issues, meant even longer delays to the tune of 6 month to a year.

For our specific oven-plight, we were supposed to have a Rofco B40 oven delivered in May (there is a story there as well) which was eventually bumped to June. It was then inevitably bumped out to August. Because we knew about the delays and uncertainty with the supply chain, we also placed another order for some Tom Chandley Compacta Pico Plus ovens that were going to be our backups in case the Rofco fell through. We are hoping the Pico's make it here in July, as originally planned. 

There are bigger problems with the world right now, so we truly take this all in under the banner of first-world-problems. We are thankful to be in the situation where we can even try to start a bakery. Meanwhile, we are still working on a lot of other parts of the business now.

In the next post, I'll share some background about the property we purchased in downtown Lafayette and the process we are going  though in planning for commercial space.