Bakery Four is Expanding!
ABOUT THE BAKERY
Bakery Four began as a cottage food bakery (home business) in September of 2019. With a focus on quality ingredients and slow food - we bring our butter, Chocolate, and Sea Salt from France, and only use stone milled flours grown on small family farms in the pacific northwest. Everything was made by Shawn, the owner and founder of Bakery Four, for about the first year of operation. Some 25,000 pastries and loaves later we brought on two bakers to help with our transition to our new location.
Shortly after discovering that there was a demand for our pastries and bread we signed a lease for our current location. Of course we did this without knowing that the COVID-19 Pandemic was right around the corner. Fortunately we were able to thrive throughout the pandemic as word-of-mouth spread quickly after opening day, many articles were written showcasing our products, and the lines continued to grow. We eventually maxed out capacity a few months ago at 300-325 pastries and a few dozen loaves every morning. Soon after we realized that the continued growth of (what we thought was) our small bakery hinged upon expanding to a larger location. This move will provide us the opportunity to serve more people more products, and be open more hours each morning. Having around 350 usable square feet has been a struggle to say the least. Our new bakery is 3,000 square feet -- featuring 1,000 square feet of production space with another 2,000 square feet of coffee bar, service, and seating. The new bakery will have the capacity to more than quadruple our production, allow us to fit more bakers and team members, and also give us the opportunity to experiment with more things like an expanded breakfast menu with sandwiches and tartines, dinner pop-ups, outside chef showcases, and an expansive lunch menu.
FUNDING
With the rising costs of construction due to the pandemic, our costs to build out the space are far greater than we anticipated. We'll be putting all of our funding towards new equipment and build out related costs. We've already secured our larger equipment like our new deck oven, Convection oven, and much more. There are many other costs that have risen out of our extended buildout timeline as the result of multiple issues throughout the last few months.
We couldn't have done any of this without the generosity, support, and patience of the community and we will be forever grateful to everyone who has patronized the bakery, shared a social media post, told a friend about the bakery, and wrote a review. We hope that you all will continue to support our journey, and we will do our best to provide you with the best possible baked goods that are made with the highest quality ingredients and attention to detail possible.
We'd love for you to help us secure some of these items, and thank you all for your time and consideration. Hopefully we'll see you at the new bakery this fall!
Shawn and Alex