Monday, February 26, 2007

Portland Bakery Tour

This is going to be a long post, so grab a cup of coffee or martini, depending on what time of day it is, and read on.

We toured several Portland bakeries this weekend, with the express goal of helping to figure out how the sugar shop will look. What works, what doesn't in terms of layout. What the appropriate feeling of the shop should be based on the desserts we're going to sell. Oh, and taste a bunch of stuff to get inspired to bake again.

Our first stop was Sahagun Chocolates, which was difficult to find, and we had to resort to calling for directions, but we made it to their tiny little shop. When we say tiny we say less than 300 square feet! The atmosphere was casual and the furnishings were a mish-mash, which meant to me that they were serious about the chocolate, and that's all. There wasn't much of a theme to the decorations, but there were interesting things to look at. They had about 3 seats that faced the window with a small case and tiny espresso machine. The owner gave us a tour of the back room, and we chatted about how she liked it better than hauling stuff around to the farmer's market. They had been there 2 years, and settled into a nice flow. They had a bunch of customers stop in over the 30 minutes or so we were there, so neither the size nor "hidden-ness" of their location didn't seem to be hurting them. We bought several truffles we haven't tasted yet, had a really fabulous homemade soda, and an even better hot chocolate, which was so rich and complex we melted with every sip.

Back in the car for a few minutes for our next stop at the Pearl Bakery. We really liked how there was a big open space to walk into with a nice hexagonal tile floor and rich wood furniture. The main case was open on the top with a big glass sneeze guard in front of them. The bakery specializes in bread, and everybody had a shirt which said "eat bread" which probably doubled as a good way to get somebody to buy the shirts. We tried the bouchon, a brioche rolled in sugar, and a fig cookie. We also liked how some of the huge bakery production space was visible, but not to cluttered looking, mostly because the oven in front of the doorway was massive.

Walked a few blocks in the rain to the beautifully appointed chocolate shop called Cacao, a fairly new shop. You walked in the door through a few seats. On the left was a bunch of chocolate bars, cool looking hot chocolate, and other bits and pieces of paraphenalia scattered about. On the right was a bar with a small jewel like case with one piece per flavor of chocolates from various sources. The shop specializes in drinking chocolate although they only had three or four flavors (probably because their drinking chocolate is made in these fancy schmancy apparatus that look pretty spendy). I have to say the drinking chocolate at Sahagun was a bit more to our liking, but it was certainly nice to see the genre taken to the next level.

We then hooked up with a couple of friends to continue our tour. On the way back to the car, I stopped at a fairly new shop called Sweet masterpiece. I was initially not going to buy anything, but then I saw that they had Sea Foam, john's favorite, so I picked up a pack and then walked over to the case and started talking to the woman behind the counter who turned out to be one of the owners. Her shop included chocolates from a number of companies including her own; however they weren't really noted as such (for that matter, they weren't noted at Cacao either). The shop looked a bit like Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor with marble-ish countertops and a whole lot of brass trim. It felt "family", the sort of family with kids.

Next stop was Ken's Artisan Bakery, another place specializing in bread. The layout was really nice with a diagonally placed case which started with the cold case and then moved on to the dry case and then the register. The menu for prepared items was above on a chalk board (albeit a bit smudged). The decor seemed a bit plain, but functional. Some of the production areas were visible, but not overly so. There was a nice big communal table, which matched the comfy decor perfectly.

We did a quick stop at Voodoo Donuts, a tiny little punk (I must say supremely punk) shop tucked away near what seemed to be a part of town with a bunch of bars. Their big deal is that they stay open late and catch the bar crowd when they need a little sugar and grease after drinking. The shop was clutter-ific with tons of little clippings strewn across the walls. A dusty grimy giant foam donut hung on the wall. The case was a vertical rotating case with several different donuts haphazardly placed inside, representing what was currently available. With the grumpy staff, so-so donuts, there was almost a complete disregard for quality of anything about the experience, but it was worth stopping in, if only just to see the rawness of the shop. Like punk, it seemed it was not about the quality of the music, but about the angst in expressing it.

After Voodoo, we hit the new Pix Patisserie. We had been to the one on Hawthorne, and we were actually suprised to see that they had in three years expanded to three locations. The shop looked like a parlor with red velvet wallpaper and a series of salon-style gold mirrors along the wall. The case ran along almost the width of the shop, and it was jam packed with all sorts of chocolates, cakes, gelees and treats. there were little signs propped in each of the desserts with descriptions. It was a lot to take in. On each of the tables, there was a photo album menu(remember the shop is called "Pix") with descriptions. Pictures would have been over the top, but that's an awful lot of work for a pastry chef to take on ;) The treats were very creative and elaborately designed, almost too fussy. I know how much work it is when each piece has several different garnishes, and thusly, I know that you have to increase the batch size to make the labor work out. It's more about the bravado of the chef than the flavor of the pastries.

Then it was nap time.

The next day we only hit one place, Crema, which was more of a coffee focused place. Clean, beautiful, elegant. A bit homey and uncluttered, but the layout was not ideal for the pastries, which were just cast off to the side. We liked the light wood that was unvarnished, and the big rollup windows really opened up the space. The place was full with people parked with their laptops, and there was lots of traffic in and out of the space.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Blogging It

I spent the whole day reading blogs, maybe because it was really cold outside, or maybe because I couldn't think of anything better to do. I should have probably done a little work in the yard, or maybe some work towards figuring out some of the details of the shop, but I'm really forcing myself to balance "doing" with "absorbing".

I did manage a really nice walk with our dog, Betty Crocker. (We named her Betty first, then made the realization that her name would also be Crocker. Honestly!) We went down a bunch of unknown and cool hills on purpose so we could get some good uphill action on the way back. I told her when we walked behind the Cafe Lladro on California that "this is where the people who go to Cafe Lladro live". She was unamused, more excited about the new smells.

The blog I completely absorbed myself in was about Criollo Bakery in Portland, http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=40758 I read and read clicking on as many links as I could without losing the story. The story was heartwarming and it really hit me how much work this is going to be. I know how I get with wanting to do everything, never able to say "no" to any of my ideas. How I want to have my cake and eat it too. Always. But I have to be strong. This new bakery venture is going to be different than before. I have made a promise to my husband. It is very important to keep our life in perspective with our careers. Sure in my life those two overlap, but in the past three years the bakery has been the only thing that has gotten my energy, and it has gotten all of it. Exercising, eating healthy, and spending time with my husband are very important to me. So I've got to spend some time making sure I do my planning, and start imagining some rules to live by when I'm in bakery triage. I've got to know when to cut something out to save my sanity. I was thinking about all these things while I read about Criollo.

I finished the thread and immediately wrote to the pastry chef, hoping to get a few good words of encouragement with my upcoming adventure. A few hours later, following another thread, I learned that Criollo was CLOSED! This was a huge surprise. My husband got a look of fear in his face. The reality of owning a bakery, which we have known all along to be the riskiest venture we would ever undertake, and which is why we've had such a hard time coming to grips with how much $$ is at stake, set in real hard. I had been thinking, "she worked 120 hour weeks, I'm going to be smarter." Now I'm thinking, "she worked 120 hour weeks and it wasn't ENOUGH."

I know in my heart that she worked herself into the ground. I know how hard it is to find good help, and hard it is to continue to pay people when you could do the same job in way less time. I know how expensive running a bakery is, and I've been spending as little money as possible. I know I run that risk of running myself into the ground. These moments of anticipation are tough, the next step is HUGE, but a little reality check, even though it might make the fear grow momentarily, helps to put it all in perspective, and as a result I've been putting a lot of thought into how the bakery fits into my life rather than how the bakery takes over my life.

Oh, and those hills, they are getting easier.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

The Counter Offer

After a long and arduous task of crunching numbers, we decided to meet the owner half way. I was extremely nervous going to meet him to present my offer. I knew I had to be confident about all aspects of the offer, be tough, and not talk too much.

On the way, I noticed a very interesting thing about myself. When I am scared, I just want to curl up and take a nap. I am pretty sure I'm not the only person who does this, but I had never quite realized this in my own behavior. It's this weird feeling, pulling me back home. There was a lot of traffic on the way, which didn't help. I just wanted to be home with the kitties and the puppy. But as soon as I walked into the shop and saw the owner standing there, the feeling went away.

The shop owner actually handled the over-talking for me, which made it easier for me to clear my head. I actually had to steer the conversation to the actual offer while he tried to clutter my mind with information about his business that was so obvious. He said more than three times that he would take only his personal effects from the business, and everything else would stay. As if I would want him to leave his comb! I was strong. I was confident. I was very sure of myself. What a rush! I presented my offer, which I knew I would have to sell because it was lower than he wanted. But I did not waiver. I made all my points supporting my offer, and made a solid attempt to convince him to accept it. (This was, of course, in between all of his babbling and triple explaining of every aspect of the business.) It was clear that I was in the driver's seat, and that actually felt good, which was a surprise because I thought I only liked the pastry making part of the business. We negotiated and negotiated. We talked about when rent would begin; he of course wanting me to start paying rent in March (only two weeks away), and me wanting to start in May (but conceding to start in April). It came down to about $5,000 we were grappling...not much in the scheme of opening a bakery, but in my mind not something to easily cast away. In our counter offer, we went almost $12,000 over what we thought were the useful assets of the business. But that was alright in a way because we were getting rent for about $1,000 less than comparable places in the area. But we still felt we were throwing $12,000 "away" in a sense, so adding $5,000 to that seems hard. We want to win, but we also don't want to lose. We can win by being right (and not paying the $5k), or we can win by being "wrong" (and paying the 5k). We can also lose by not paying the $5k, and run the risk of not having a shop for another full year since there's very few spaces opening up. It's a tough call.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Getting Ready for the Next Big Step

On Wednesday, I meet with the owner of a specialty food shop to make our second offer to purchase his business and assume the remainder of his lease. Our first offer, which was quite a bit lower than he had wanted, but all that we felt we could afford, was refused. After he called and told us the news, we were a bit disappointed, but as my husband reminded me, “the offer was good, and if we don’t get it, it wasn’t meant to be”. So we stepped up our search, checking Craigslist every day (sometimes twice a day), dug out any people that could help us with our search. Nothing really jumped out at us, except a much smaller place in Belltown that was not that much cheaper and poorly laid out.

On the one hand, I wanted to open a shop so badly that almost anything would work, but on the other, I knew that my shop would be something special, and I had to wait for something that “felt” right. This “feeling” was so hard to describe to real estate professionals and even my husband, but it was an extremely important component to completing the vision of the business, my dream. I knew that specialty food shop had the feeling, so I was searching for something similar. Hope seemed a bit weak.

And then a few months later, that specialty food shop owner called back. The offer he wants me to submit is about 11 grand higher than our original offer. In the scheme of opening a food establishment, it’s not that much money, but for everyday people like us recovering from cancer, it really is. So we really have to be smart about how we phrase our counter offer. Negotiating actually is quite fun if you think about it. It seems to be all about trying to make the other person think they’re getting a deal. So for example we’re going to give him most of the money he wants, BUT, we’re going to ask for two months lead time to get the shop ready. We think he’ll respond well to this offer because we’re going to tell him that those two months of lead time will be important to our success, and since we’re going to be a sub-leaser, if we fail, he fails. It feels really good to ask for what you want. I hope we get it.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Boredom and the Ultimate Pithivier

Sometimes, running a business has it’s boring moments. I spent the greater part of this afternoon going through and cleaning out my file cabinet. Because I haven’t touched the files for almost three years, the task became a nostalgic journey of sorts. It’s a huge task, but important to laying a groundwork for future organization, one of the key secrets to success in this world of entrepreneurship. I did find a nice stack of brochures and menus from other bakeries that are good to have handy, which made me think of the wonderful Pithivier I had in San Francisco.

I was going to head to Tartine, but since I have their beautiful cookbook, along the way I decided to stop at Citizen Cake in the Hayes Valley of San Francisco, right near where I used to live. With a parking spot right out front, it was an easy choice.

The Citizen Cake Pithivier was beautiful, with a darkened pinwheel etched in the top. Mind you, this was my second Pithivier ever, and I still hadn’t learned the correct pronunciation…I asked for a “pithy-vee-aay” and the barista gave me a funny look. That’s when I remembered that on my last visit the barista was snooty and I felt rushed, but that’s ok. I grabbed my nice little box of goodies and headed up to Mom’s place to share my spoils.

We cut into the pithivier and I was expecting a pale almond filling. Instead, there were luscious pale pears atop a dark almost coffee filling. The pears were poached perfectly; almost like eating a fresh pear at that brief moment that it is ripe. Below it, the dark filling turned out to be chocolate, but not just any chocolate. It had the flavor of the richest darkest chocolate bar, but the delicate texture of a moist financier. It was the most rich dark chocolate flavor I’ve ever tasted in anything other than chocolate alone. And balanced with the clean finish of the pear it was pastry nirvana. I must make puff pastry soon.

I have since learned the correct prononciation of pithivier. It’s “pee-tee-vee-aay”, or PTVA for short. Now at least my friendly barista won’t give me a funny look for that ;)

Thursday, February 8, 2007

It's ON

Just got back from a fabulous trip to California...almost a whirlwind tour hitting Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Cool (yes, that's a town), and San Francisco. Tasted some great treats from a couple fabulous bakeries and visited very close friends and family. I even walked across the Golden Gate bridge for the first time,which was surprising because I hadn't done it before, even during all those years living in and around San Fran.

Walking across the bridge seemed important this trip for some reason, and I even woke up at the ungodly hour of 7:30am to do it. (since the bakery has been on haitus, I've normally been waking up at 10:00am so this early start was a bit out of par) Anyways, I needed to do what I said I was going to do, plus I needed to move the car at a certain time, so there I was in a very beautiful fog walking. I saw the city from a different angle. I thought about all those cars driving by, what were they doing, why were they going to the city? I wondered if they were following their dreams, like I was about to do.

I saw that there were only three chances to get help if you want to make the fatal jump. It seemed like there should be more, given that the first call station was pretty far down the bridge. So if you were going to end it on the GG Bridge, you were basically on your own. For my life, that meant it was pretty much how it would have to be for me. It's just the way my mind comes to conclusions.

To the point, I'm about ready to make the next step and open a retail shop for our wholesale dessert business, sugar. Probably the biggest and scariest step I've ever taken in my life, and after this trip, I've decided to take the plunge.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

The Big Team

Yet again, I failed to keep my employees happy. We were getting ready for the second annual SweetFest so I called a meeting, inviting both my morning baker and my assistant to lunch. I really wanted to be tough, since I felt I was always too nice, so I came down hard insisting on both of them working the event, making Sugar a priority over any of their personal lives. Needless to say, it backfired and my assistant quit over the weekend. I definitely think abrupt changes are a sure sign of weakness in leader.

I spent a couple of weeks baking alone, then began crafting a plan for a new team. I hired two very experienced bakers at a little higher wage and put them to the challenge to help bring Sugar to the next level. They shared the responsibility of the morning scone bake, which was good for me because I could get better rest. In some way, I don’t think it was entirely fair for me to delegate the grunt work. I guess it didn’t feel like I was a team player, but then again I was supposed to be the leader and keep the vision of the company shining bright, a task I couldn’t do while waking up at 4am.

I really tried to let go of the stronghold I had on the bakery and let the two professionals I had hired take care of all the daily tasks. I was a bit frustrated with our consistency and the quality seemed to be slipping, but we did have probably the best product lineup Sugar has seen. We just had to get our act together and stabilize production so that I could get out and do some sales to support our new staff.

But lurking in the background we heard comments that we had more staff than the catering company. My staff were feeling uncomfortable doing dishes in front of their chef, who seemed to be searching for reasons to criticize them. I was trying my hardest to be respectful of the shared space, but I could feel the tension mounting. Finally, after a month of hearing a rumor, they let me know that I had 4 months to move out. That was very gracious of them to offer me so much time to find a new space, and I’m very thankful for that. Still, the news left me feeling very uneasy because I didn’t have much faith in Sugar’s ability to move forward, which left me in fear that we’d have to move backward.

This feeling of imminent failure put a cloud of doom over my usually optimistic personality. I started to be scared and I cut back my staff’s hours which was really unfair to them, and so after a few weeks, they both quit. I completely understand how they must have felt, and here I was, yet again, on my own with the business.

Kicking it up a notch

We were in the middle of a fairly large increase in production with recipes that we weren’t quite ready to produce in large quantities. We also had an increasing number of special orders that broke up the day weirdly. It was summer and the freezer suddenly stopped freezing. Unfortunately, one of our cakes needed to be frozen and then unmolded while it was frozen so we panicked. Luckily, we were able to get some of our product to the neighbor’s freezer, then cart them back sheet pan by sheet pan to finish each step in the production process, working as fast as we could so they wouldn’t thaw out too much. Of course we weren’t fast enough because then the neighbor closed and we had to find a second backup freezer. I was so stressed out that I didn’t do a good job of telling our landlord about the issue, so it went on unresolved for a few days. Oops.

But we got through the freezer not freezing mishap, and I of course decided to reorganize how we did the bakery production yet again. I hired a very qualified assistant who was very efficient and fast. I must say she saved the day. It was great because she took breaks. I don’t take breaks, but it was great to take breaks. I found I got a lot more done, and it was starting to seem like I could step away from the kitchen and start growing the business.

See, the problem with running a bakery is that the baking itself is so all-consuming and if that is what you like to do, it’s all you want to do. So like at the end of a busy day, you’re physically and therefore emotionally, exhausted so the last thing you want to do is try to add any more clients which would increase your work load. Plus, if you don’t necessarily account for all the little tasks that creep into every day so that an 8 hour day quickly turns into 12, you then are adding frustration to your exhaustion because you hoped you would be home by 5pm. I don’t think there was ever a day that I was home when I thought I was going to be home, it was always several hours later. This was the source of almost daily arguments with John, the sort of arguments that ended in me saying “you just don’t understand.”

John is really good at knowing his limits. What I think might be laziness is really his genius way of doing just the bare minimum of work to achieve his goals. He doesn’t bury himself in work like I do, and he’s much more relaxed and able to make quick decisions whereas I allow myself to get overworked so that I can barely decide what shirt to wear. That is why he was always able to break away from his day and jump into the bakery to help during those semi-regular emergencies. At the time I was so buried I wasn’t able to see how I could ever get perspective for the business. We had several meetings to try to resolve some of the ongoing issues with the bakery, which would solve the problem temporarily, but then the same problems would happen over and over again. The overarching secret seemed to be my leadership, which I seemed to be able to lead myself with my own goals, but when it came to my employees, I was always struggling and often failing to delegate tasks to free up more time for me.

Good help is hard to find

We were sitting at a friend’s birthday dinner talking about the demanding hours of the morning scone bake and one of his friends was sick of her job so we entertained the possibility of having her take over the position. She called the next day and said she had quit her job so the following week I auditioned her and she seemed to be a good fit. After about a week she was ready to do the bake on her own. I fell quickly into waking up when my body wanted to, which is more like 7 or 8am. I felt fabulous, well rested, and my skin even lost a few wrinkles. It wish she could have stayed with Sugar longer, because even though we had a few miscommunications along the way, it was really great having her help. Eventually, the hours took a toll on her, and it was tricky for her to justify the impact the job made on her life since I didn’t pay her that much. I contemplated not doing the scones, but they still accounted for about 20% of our sales, so we couldn’t just drop them without a backup plan.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Fame

I just happened to hear about an article written in the Stranger about pastries in Seattle. The author wrote about how the quality of pastries in coffee shops was terrible, from stale scones to overly sweet mass produced muffins. This hit home for me, since it brought me back to why we started the bakery. Still, we were struggling, and after trying to sell to coffee shops and seeing the response of baked goods in general, we were starting to understand why coffee shop owners would buy preservative laden pastries from Costco. They also have to control their costs. So I wrote a letter to the author, of course accompanied by some brioche, and she interviewed me and then wrote an article about Sugar. It was awesome to have my face in the paper with our Mousse Mountains. Our web site statistics spiked, and our retail sales soared. We had luckily just revamped the site to be more consumer friendly with more photos of our products and ways to order and such. Shortly thereafter, we landed a very important account with Metropolitan Market, which had been one of our goals right from the start. So for as much as I complain about the grueling grind of the bakery, things do have a tendency to fall into place quite serendipitously.

Grueling Grind

Without any help, it became clear to me that I could never quite get my head above the work to look to the future. So I again tried to organize the baking schedule to streamline operations. Because baking is one of those things that once you’re started, it’s hard to stop and take a break because you lose the flow, I relied a lot on John to handle deliveries and picking up supplies. It was extremely frustrating for him because he was trying to help, but of course he had other priorities and hated being called in at the last minute for emergencies based on my poor planning. We were still getting up each morning at 4am so we still had very little sleep, and weird naps after the scone bake were making it hard to concentrate and keep a flow. Eventually, we started switching off every other day, which seemed to help, but still the days we had to get up early wreaked havoc on our bodies and stress levels.

A friend of mine was between jobs so she offered to help a few days a week. She did not have any professional experience, but she was quite efficient and very helpful. She had a very good palette, and since she was hired expressly to help with production, it became very easy for me to take the role of leader.

Still, though, I was getting home late, and there was very little planning and very little business development. It was just about production and delivery, which was spinning slightly out of control. Even if I was to just take production itself, there were still so many different types of tasks…making prep items, baking, finishing. It’s not like regular cooking where you could just tell your prep cook to chop onions, then chop tomatoes, etc.; bakery prep is a little more complicated and it seemed difficult for me to break it down into tasks a person with little training could do. Plus, I am a perfectionist who doesn’t know what I want so it’s very difficult for me to lead.

Apple Pie


Baseball season was about to start, and I remembered an old kitchen mate who had been selling sandwiches in front of the ball park, and suddenly I got this idea that I could make apple pie. After doing a little research and finding no other competition, I started to do a little planning and wrote up a quick plan based upon quickly and simply getting up and running with very little startup costs. According to our calculations, we’d have to sell 200 pies/day to make a small profit, which with 80 games, added up to some $80,000, which seemed pretty good for 9 months. Plus, with one product that we’d mass produce, eventually we’d be a lot more efficient and it would get easier and easier to make the pies. Once those were stabilized, we could venture onto new products.

I hired some temporary help to produce the pies, and we made some 100 pies the first day, since they took a lot longer than we had hoped; but that seemed ok and it’s always better to sell out than make too much and have to throw product away. However, unfortunately, those big dreams ended in sadness as we only sold 20 pies the first day, and gave the rest away. The second day we sold 12, and the third day I think we only sold 10. There were a number of things going on. Number 1 was people weren’t going to games since the Mariners weren’t winning. Number 2 was people didn’t really like new things at the games (although the Shishka-Berries, chocolate dipped strawberries on a stick did quite well). Number 3 was that people didn’t understand the idea of a small pie for $5 when you could buy a HUGE pie at Costco for almost the same price. Clearly, baseball fans were not our target market, and even if we did eventually reach our goal, we would be losing about $500/day to get there, and by our estimations we’d be well into the following year before that would be possible. So we cancelled the big Apple Pie venture. To be honest, loading the van, setting up and then packing, loading and unloading the van again every day was a lot of tedious work so it was a relief not to have to worry about that anymore.

Unfortunately, my temporary help had to be let go as well, as her position was going to be paid by the apple pie proceeds. That was too bad because she really wanted it to work. Luckily, she landed a great job at a cool bakery south of Seattle.

Back in the swing of things

The holiday season was over, as were the slow first few months of the year. It was time to really start kicking into full speed ahead and start a plan to bring Sugar into profitability. I started looking at our costs, briefly, and started to see that we were losing money on labor, and probably losing money on ingredients, both due to the high cost of production. At the time, however, both me and my assistant really liked the science and exploration of developing new products, but we lacked the organization to make our time spent worthwhile. In retrospect, what I should have done is stopped the product development, and instead concentrate on increasing our client base and getting more organized to handle increased production volumes. A lot of what was slowing us down in product development was trying to reach our new target of multiplying our ingredient cost by five. We probably should have raised our prices rather than price based on what we thought the market would bear.

I tried several different tactics to try to get me and my assistant organized, but nothing really seemed to save us any time or reduce any of the stress. After working for a week on my own and finding it was less stressful, I decided it would be easier to let my assistant go. This was a very difficult decision because I really wanted Sugar to grow, and knew that without my assistant the business would sit idle, but I wasn’t ready to handle all the responsibilities of being a manager. I knew I had to stabilize who I was in relation to Sugar by spending a little bit of time producing my own products.

Monday, February 5, 2007

The Expense of Product Development

It was January and we had a little bit of time to kill, so we decided to put on a special event for Valentine’s Day, centered on the theme of extravagant desserts. I had never put on, promoted, or even planned for an event except my wedding reception, but unless you try something once, it’s difficult to know whether you can do it or not. It’s that old thing that if you don’t try, you automatically fail.

We spend a LOT of time deciding on the menu, and an especially long time developing the cake for the chocolate sushi. In retrospect, once things seem to be taking too much time, I should have cut my losses and moved on to another dessert. But it’s hard to focus when you have a certain idea. However, when you have a certain idea and are spending a lot of energy trying to make only that idea work, you aren’t always able to step back and realize there are other ways to achieve the same idea.

There were a lot of deadlines and milestones when putting on an event, so it’s difficult to keep it all together. The most important thing was selling the event, and we did a fair job doing that; however as the day got closer, we realized we needed to fill up the space, so John invited a lot of his friends for free, just so our paying customers wouldn’t feel awkward sitting in an empty space.

The menu was pretty great, starting with habanero truffles, lemon lavender tartlets, chocolate sushi, mini chocolate mousse mountains (garnished with dry ice), white chocolate passionfruit bonbons. It was an all-you-can-eat event, so we went around a few times to give seconds to people. The event was rather lovely, and we were quite proud, but all told it was not good for business since we lost a lot of time in product development and we didn’t really sell enough tickets to pay for our expenses. It could have been good for marketing, but mostly it was good for experience. The guests really had a great time, and that was a good feeling for me that lasted a while.

New Kitchen

As our business was growing, we started looking into our growing operating costs and decided to look into building a commercial kitchen in our former garage. It would be relatively easy to do; we just had to figure out a way to make sure our animals were locked out. But the drawback was that if we wanted to have any employees, we’d have to also build out a restroom separate from our one in the house. We were sort of figuring out all the particulars, doing layouts, pricing out equipment and such, while running the business.

Meanwhile, we had met a new client while doing the Farmer’s Markets, a catering company based in West Seattle. Turns out they were sharing their kitchen with a bakery that just happened to be going out of business, so they asked us to share with them. It would actually be cheaper rent than the previous kitchen, but we’d have to buy a few pieces of equipment. We figured we’d eventually need to make some investments, and it seemed a good time to make a move. Plus, the shared kitchen space was getting a little crowded, and some of the other businesses in that kitchen were growing to the point that it was difficult to get into the oven. So we moved.

The former bakery wanted to sell us their oven, but because it was a built-in oven, we didn’t want to purchase it, especially since we didn’t have a lease on the space and we couldn’t move it if we had to move. We told them they were free to take it, but also knew that because it was built-in, they probably wouldn’t take it so we’d probably end up with a free oven, but we certainly weren’t going to pay for an oven that would be no use for us. Like we told them, they could take it anytime. But they never did.

We had a lot more space than we did previously which immediately saved us loads of time because we didn’t have to store half of our ingredients at home. Everything would be at the kitchen. Plus, we had just purchased a double door reach in refrigerator, which was right behind us, substantially reducing the time back and forth to the walk-in. So this big improvement gave us the extra push to start thinking about expanding and growing, but first we had to get through the busy holiday season.

Sales numbers and sales goals

Unfortunately, we lost all of our business earnings data from the first few months, but started fresh in January of 2004. I had this feeling Sugar wasn’t really meeting her sales goals, from the small size of the deposit slips. John was still doing the sales calls, and we lost a few clients due to poor sales of our products.

Oh, funny story about this one espresso company we had sold to. John brought by samples and they were excited about the tarts, although they said that high end things usually don’t sell. They finally agreed to try the tarts, which John took to mean they would start a standing order, which was how most of our clients were ordering. So we started delivering to them. Then one day, John was delivering and the barista refused the order, saying that she was not supposed to accept anything from us. When I called later to find out what was going on, the owner yelled at me, accusing us of delivering products she hadn’t ordered. I tried to explain to her it was a misunderstanding, and that we had thought she wanted a standing order, and then she told me we could come pick up the tarts from the previous week, that she hadn’t opened the box. Well of course those were already too old, and I was shocked that she thought I would take them back and try to re-use them. I happily voided all her orders and told her she did not owe us anything, and apologized for the miscommunication.

Anyway, our sales for January were only about $234 so we needed to do something to boost things. I was still working at that catering company about 2 days a week, which generated enough money to pay the rent for the kitchen, but John was thinking why not increase our sales to pay for the kitchen?

I had just done a cookie calendar and was thinking about adding some fancy cookies to our lineup. I made up little baggies of cookies and started showing them to our clients. This was NOT the big chocolate chip cookie, and this was something that could retail for $1.00 or so. I made up little lintzer hearts and little heart shaped cookies for Valentine’s day. They sold really well, or so we thought. Then I tried some cookies for St. Patrick’s day which were really cute and they had little fortune scrolls in the packs. They didn’t sell as strongly, but people really liked the shortbread. This is probably where I learned that ideas are hard to sell, but cookies are good to eat.

Meanwhile, John was playing music at an event for one of our clients who had been coincidentally ordering a large sized tart once/week. So he decided to bring some of my cookies to the show and hand them out. The client expressed interest in having some new cookies at his shop, so I set to work on some samples. At the time, there was a lot of interest in Lavender as a culinary herb so I worked on some lavender shortbread and some chocolate dipped mint shortbread. I remember putting a big purple white chocolate “L” on the lavender. I don’t know why; it looked a bit stupid, like the “L” on Laverne’s sweater from Laverne and Shirley. Of course any of the clients I showed it to were like “yes, I like the shortbread, but I don’t like the “L”.” Of course, our client from the big shop we really wanted more of our stuff in, wanted us to cut the shortbread differently. We decided that would be ok, but we wanted him to buy the whole pan in that case. Another client in a Tea House up north wanted the smaller shortbread as well. I started to have a lot of pride and even cockiness when it came to our products, and when I went on sales calls, I was like “of course you want our shortbread, it’s the best in the city”. It was weird that we actually had to convert the Tea House dude to our shortbread, since his shortbread was so crappy and wasn’t even made with butter, but he eventually caved and agreed to buy our shortbread, which we developed two additional flavors for him: lemon ginger, and orange cranberry. Things seemed to be looking up, and at least some of our deliveries wouldn’t be just $6.00 each drop, so that we were at least heading in the right direction to become profitable, or so we thought.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Employee Do’s and Don’ts

We started putting the word out that we were looking for help, and one of our clients introduced us to one of her baristas. It didn’t seem like the best match, but we decided to try her out, despite the fact that she didn’t have much experience in the kitchen; she did have a willingness to learn, and seemed very helpful. It was so difficult to train somebody, and I just ended up being friendly, which didn’t necessarily work as a business advantage, as she eventually got so interested in chatting that her work speed suffered a bit. Eventually, I realized I needed a little more qualified help, so I decided to call upon my former boss at the catering company and see if she was interested in helping me out. Turns out my timing was great as she wanted to change jobs anyway, so I hired her and we began working swiftly to expand the product line.

Meeting our Goals

It was about 1 week before my birthday, and I thought I’d check how Sugar was doing financially. We had hit $2800 in April! This was our original sales goal and it was a great birthday present. We were paying the bills entirely with sugar bucks, but of course we had no idea where we stood profit-wise. I decided it was time to hire some help.

The Hope of Getting Big

I was getting a little bit frustrated at the kitchen. Pieces of equipment seemed to be disappearing and reappearing, and my eggs and other ingredients often went missing. So we put an ad on Craig’s List that we were looking for a new kitchen space. This guy from a bagel company called us and said he’s looking for somebody to share his kitchen with. We told him we were making tartlets and he said he might be able to sell them to a few of his clients. At that time, he was starting to do a little distribution on the side so he could make his deliveries worthwhile. His kitchen space wasn’t that great and we’d have to buy our own equipment so we decided to stay where we were. He almost tried to say that he wasn’t going to distribute our products unless we shared his kitchen, but we held strong and told him we really didn’t need him to sell our products. We sent him an aweful lot of samples, but he was finally able to sell our tarts to a few of his clients. It was sort of a pain because he would fax us the order by the afternoon, and we had less than 24 hours to fulfill it. So we had to be really organized with our stock, otherwise, I’d have to head down to the kitchen for an emergency bake which sucked. Eventually, most of his clients went on a standing order, but it still wasn’t enough to write home about. He handled our products very poorly, we heard horror stories from the grocery stores that he would just throw our packaged tart clamshells in a big grocery cart so they’d be all broken. Eventually, his clients dropped him, and we walked away. Of course he didn’t pay his final invoice, but he was so creepy, we almost didn’t care, but sent a collection agency after him anyway who failed to collect.

What the client wants, we make

This was the beginning of the phase which sort of diversified our products, as clients would request specific products, and we would figure out a way to make them. I guess it’s hard to find good bakeries, which is why we started a bakery to begin with.

I had just quit my job at the catering company and was focusing as much energy as possible on sugar. I still did a little bit of web design, though, just to keep the cash flowing.

So then the big downtown coffee house guy asked if we’d make scones. Of course that meant daily deliveries before they opened which was 6am. Mind you, I’m not a morning person, so I told hime I’d only be able to do them if they were baked at nite. We began developing a couple scone recipes and went through the approval process. He finally approved the scones and we started production. It was extremely trickly working out the kinks of mass production and at first I must say the first few weeks consistency suffered greatly. We kept getting complaints about the oat scones being too heavy. I thought they were pretty good, and even brought them to a bakery at PCC (a local natural food market) for a second opinion. The client at one point said we should make a regular scone and just sprinkle oats on top. That was so absurd I thought. It wouldn’t be an oat scone then. I held my ground, and then finally produced a new revised scone that seemed to satisfy both of us. I think it’s important for the client to trust the professional, but I also think there has to be a comfortable area of collaboration. After all, it’s sort of a partnership in some way.

But one of the concessions I did make, and it was a tough one, was that I’d bake the scones in the morning right before delivering them. That meant getting up at 4am to run down to turn the oven on, put the scones in at 5am, and then pack up and leave the kitchen by 5:45am to get the delivery to the shop by 5:55am. If we were any later, we would get the sneer from the barista who would glance at the clock. But hey, what other bakery would deliver warm scones before 6am!

Getting up in the morning was grueling. I would do the bake and John would show up around 5:30 to pick up the scones to deliver them. We were both really really groggy at all times. And really this was for only about $40 bucks a day. That’s gross sales, people! We knew we had to sell scones to other clients to make it worth our while to wake up so early. Originally, I thought with a typical 8 hour day, I’d be out of the kitchen by about noon, and out on the patio by 3pm sipping tea or wine. Of course I didn’t take into account how much being groggy slows you down. Usually, I was out of the kitchen around 4pm. Often, I would sneak home after the scones were baked and take a power nap, only to return groggy in a different way. You know how they say loss of sleep makes you crazy, well I think we were both going a little crazy, slowly.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Working out some kinks

Remembering back, it was a few weeks in after we started selling the tarts that the sales dropped off quite a bit. We still weren’t making all that much, but we decided to switch things up and try something else. For one thing, the chocolate espresso pear had quickly fallen out of favor. I don’t think really anybody wanted to order it, so we quickly replaced it with a simple almond pear which was thankfully an easy switch. The other thing that started to become apparent was the size of the tarts made them not quite right for the espresso crowd. It is weird in a way because most chocolate chip cookies you can get are so huge that you could easily have one for an entire meal. However, a chocolate chip cookie was half the price of one of our tarts retail so since Americans prefer value over quality people would pick the cookie. Espresso drinks are already expensive enough to begin with, sometimes almost 5 bucks, so to pay another $3.50 for a tart would put the bill total around $8 bucks, which starts to seem like $10, which seems like an awful lot to pay for a cup of coffee.

So I made a few mini tarts and brought them home. We weighed them and had figured out they were about 1/3 the weight of the larger ones, so we settled on $.50/ea and would sell them by the dozen. We didn’t want our retailers to have to sell the tarts for over $1.00 so we priced it based on what we thought the market would bear. In retrospect, that was obviously a bad choice because the labor was going to kill us. We had not costed out our recipes, we had some general idea, but nothing exact. We had also based our markup on about triple the ingredient costs, which we’d learn was not enough of a markup. Because the recipes were so multi-faceted with various prep items and steps to produce, we didn’t exactly know how long they took to make.

However, we did figure out is that it was ok to freeze the tarts. That saved us tons of time, and I was beginning to work out a production schedule in my mind. We were still focused on only baking about 1 week at a time, and since our orders were not that huge, it was a lot of work for very little return, especially since we had just shot ourselves in the foot by making our products (and therefore our price/unit) smaller.

Getting a little Professional Experience

I knew it would probably help me to work in the industry at least a little bit, just to get a feel for mass production and how to transition from my home kitchen. So I got a job at a catering company on the East Side. I would work there two nights a week, helping them with various very basic breakfast pastries like muffins and scones. They had their own pastry chef who took care of all their high end mini desserts and other more exotic pastries. My boss and I clicked immediately and we started to figure out we had a lot in common. Unfortunately, a lot of the job involved me sequestered in a corner making massive amounts of muffin batter and cutting tons of scones. I worked really fast, but then also noticed I made a lot of little mistakes that I was usually able to correct, but it was a little annoying because I like to do things right. It was cool because I got to know the pastry chef some, who, incidentally, makes the most amazing bread, so full of flavor. My boss taught me a lot about being efficient and saving time, and she was very obsessed with saving on dishes, to such an extent that sometimes she would plan production around trying to use the same bowl or bin for an entire production session without washing it. It was definitely intersesting.

After a couple of months and the year was coming to an end, it became increasingly difficult to break up my week and spend two days on the East Side, which would upset Sugar’s bakery production and make it difficult for me to manage. The thing was that I was earning just enough to cover my rent at the shared kitchen, but then my brilliant husband said, “why don’t you just sell more pastries for Sugar to pay your rent.” So then I began outlining a plan to grow Sugar and decided to quit the catering company. I learned a lot in my short stay there, but it was time to move on. I probably gained 5 lbs because we were always snacking on mini desserts, and there were always a few scones for me to eat on the long drive home.

The next few days at the Commercial Kitchen

I went in with a fresh start and a list of things to do that day, more prepared for what to expect, and feeling a bit stronger. I made crusts and let them rest, fillings, and then, my nemesis, caramel, which worked out fine. I decided not to use a thermometer, but to watch it carefully. That seemed to work.

I think the next day I came in to roll out and bake some tarts. I was going to use the big deck oven , which was pretty absurd because I was only probably baking 1 sheet pan of tarts, and the oven held like 24 sheet pans. But I snuck in with another guy who was also baking, even though he thought I should just use the smaller oven and not get in his way even though we were supposed to share. Whatever.

The tarts came out slouchy and ugly looking. The crust wasn’t setting up quick enough and they were not holding their shape, nor were they browning well at all. Also, the bottoms were not baking evenly: the center was almost raw and the outer edges were dark and golden. We gave them away to some strange bread people that had come in. I felt really weird like I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was scared a little about my ability to figure out what was going wrong. We talked to Keith, the kitchen manager, who had been a pastry chef for many years, about what was going on and he gave us some tips. I also did a little bit of research on the web.

At this time I was still working during the day and baking at night, but the holiday season was approaching and I knew as a bakery we would be stupid not to take advantage of it. John had actually just gotten a job offer for a temporary position where he would work from home. So in the next week or so I gave my notice and on my last day, my coworkers gave me an embroidered apron as a farewell present.

Also, I think at that time, I decided to take a position as a baker at a catering company on the East Side where I would be baking mostly muffins and scones, but getting some real live industry experience.

I think our dreams of getting all this holiday business were a little grandiose, or perhaps we simply didn’t know how to tap into that market because for some reason we didn’t end up making all that much money during the holidays. I do remember working all night baking just 3 pumpkin tarts (I only had 1 pan). It was one of those funny stories where I would nap while they were baking, and wake up just before the timer went off. I also remember 1 of the tarts came out really dark and the other 2 were lighter, and John who packed them while I slept, didn’t realize this was important and I think gave one person 2 tarts which were different colors. I remember a whole lot of stuff like that at that time where I was so focused on the minute details like matching colors that I would just get very little done. This was I think the beginning of my time management crisis.

My first day at the Commercial Kitchen

We decided it was best to start small, and so we only paid for 20 hours/week at the kitchen, so I had to plan my bakery production carefully. For our rent of $500/mo (I would later find out they also charged for utilities, which was basically whatever they felt like billing which was almost $200/mo), I got ½ a baker’s rack of storage in the fridge and freezer, plus one long shelf of dry storage. We moved me in and I got to work making caramel and various prep items. First thing I noticed was I didn’t have pans or utensils and I guess they didn’t come with the kitchen. So I borrowed from another renter and tried to make it work for that first day. It was weird because I felt like I had to ask other renters about every little thing, and they didn’t seem to helpful; rather, they were probably busy and very focused on their own dilemmas about running a food business. In a way, it made me feel a bit insecure, but I’ve always had trouble in that area. I also was kind of bummed because one of the reasons I was into the idea of sharing a kitchen was to collaborate with other food businesses, but I guess we didn’t share too much in common.

Anyway, I was very careful making the caramel, and had my glass candy thermometer clipped to the pan. When I tried to brush down the sides with a wet pastry brush, small glass-like bubbles of very hot sugar syrup formed and then exploded everywhere, cracking the thermometer, and scarring the shit out of me. I don’t know what I did with the caramel at that moment (which was filled with toxic mercury from the busted thermometer, but I do remember stepping outside and calling John, crying as soon as I heard his voice. I had this feeling of not wanting to start the bakery. That it was too hard. That it was too dangerous. I was afraid I would get hurt, take an eye out or something! Eventually I calmed down, and John told me to pack up and come home. I had this feeling of defeat, but knew in that state of mind, it was better for me to start fresh in the morning.

Friday, February 2, 2007

The race for who quits their job first


Both John and I were sick of our jobs. Well, I wasn’t necessarily sick of my job, more like de-poofed and unmotivated. John had true hatred of his job, he couldn’t stand the thought of being in that building for one more minute. Being the more motivated one, John took the reins and organized our first sample run. He went out and scoped different places and we started to compile a list of places that might want to buy our tarts. From our home kitchen, I baked up 6 or 7 of each of the four flavors of tarts, and boxed them up to be ready for our field trip the next day. I put a stack of order forms next to the boxes.

We decided the best time to hit our targets was after the morning rush, but before the lunch rush. We packed up the car and off we went. I think the first place we went to was C&P coffee company in our neighborhood. I had done a scoping mission a few days prior and the fanciest thing they were selling were these rum cakes, which isn’t something I normally gravitate towards, so I knew we had half a chance. I was far too nervous to sell my own wares the first day out, so I sent John in solo. He bought a coffee and struck up a conversation with the Barista, who turned out to be the owner (pretty likely since most coffee shops in Seattle are teeny tiny). I don’t know what he said to her, but then he came out to the car and got a box of tarts, and told me it was going well. He talks to her for a bit, then out to the next place. We probably hit about 6 places that day, I think.

The next morning first thing, we still weren’t used to the idea of waking up early, we got an order from C&P. Later that day (or maybe it was the next day), John followed up with the places we’d dropped samples off to and got I think 3 more orders, with a couple of “unsures”. In the next couple of days, we tried to secure our commercial kitchen, but then knew we wouldn’t be totally setup for a little while, so we had to bake our first couple of orders in our home kitchen, which we know is a big no-no for the Health Department, but we were really excited people liked the tarts, and didn’t want to screw up that opportunity.

I think it was the next week that John gave notice for his job, and he was going to do sales for Sugar full time since I still had not gotten enough courage to sell yet. I would stay at my job until I got too busy to handle it. We still needed to pay the bills so we had to proceed with caution. We didn’t know how long it would take to become profitable, but we were assuming at least a year. John picked up a few more clients, and I started baking at the new rented commercial kitchen.

We still didn’t know where to get our ingredients. Suppliers never returned any of our calls. Luckily, we found Cash & Carry which had a lot of our supplies, and there was also Costco, which was a big hassle to go to, but cheaper for eggs, and they had heavy cream in 32 oz containers; whereas Cash & Carry only had them in 64oz size. I couldn’t imagine using that much! The thing that sucked was that the date on the Costco cream was always pretty soon, in fact often the cream was out of date, but we really didn’t have a choice, or any other solutions so we pressed on.

Recipe Development and tying up loose ends

Perhaps the most challenging recipe was the dessert that actually inspired me to start the business, the caramel apple tart. I started by filling tart shells with apples tossed in cinnamon sugar, baking them like open-faced pies, then drizzling freshly melted burnt sugar on the top. The sugar would harden before I could drizzle it over all the tarts, and I started to think in the back of my mind that this might become a problem if I was going to produce these in any decent volume. Also, they were great within a couple of hours, but by morning, the caramel melted into the juices coming out of the apples making little cups of messy sticky goodness. We got several comments on how great the tarts were, but how tricky they were to eat. I tried several different caramel recipes; tried several different techniques for assembling them to prevent weeping, and almost decided that the danger involved in eating the tarts would be part of their charm. Also, the apple tarts didn’t look as pretty or finished as the other tarts. I was also making a raspberry white chocolate tart which was a tart shell filled with a cake-like filling and then topped with raspberries and drizzled with white chocolate. I thought about it for a second, and then thought that what the caramel apple tart needed was the same sort of little sponge to catch all the apple juices. Almost that same day it seemed, I got one of those apple/peeler/corer contraptions and decided to use it to prep the apples, thus making nice thin slivers of apple instead of the ultra-rustic chunks that made the tart look so out of place. Finally, I decided to tuck the caramel under the apples because then I didn’t have to warm it up and drizzle it over the tart, where it would just melt off and look weird soon thereafter. So the final tart was crust on the bottom, nice spongy cake (actually a browned butter filling), caramel apples (dredged in cinnamon sugar) and glaze. In my mind, it was genius, any caramel apple juicyness would just drip down and soak into the lovely sponge cake, also preventing a soggy crust, but preserving all the flavors I loved. Doesn’t that sound good?

So in my mind things were progressing nicely, and we had reached a major milestone with the technical difficulties of our favorite tart. We still had a few kinks with the caramel chocolate pecan tart…the ganache was cracking after about a day. We read that adding a little corn syrup to the ganache would help with cracking so we experimented with that. It helped, but the ganache still cracked. Eventually, it turned out that switching brands of cream was the big help.

Things were coming together, we had a business plan, we had some of our products almost finalized, the people at my work seemed to be starting to get suspicious about all the pastries I was bringing in, but they were enjoying them too much to really suspect I was planning to change careers. I knew I loved to bake, and felt a strong sense that I could make it work somehow. John and I had long discussions about our finances, and we did some planning to figure out how much money we’d need to survive on.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

The Peel Party

We had about 4 flavors of tarts at this point, which was our target…the caramel apple, the chocolate caramel pecan, the raspberry white chocolate, and the chocolate espresso pear. I made up about 5 or 6 dozen of these in little tartlet pans and packed them up with some platters for a friend of John’s studio party. We were of the first ones there, and I was so nervous plattering the desserts, but I got through it, and then laid a stack of hand cut business cards in front of the desserts before heading to the wine table.

One of the studio partners at the time, Tia, came over and talked to me, gushing a bit on the beauty of the desserts, but almost too much so. I smiled courteously, and gloated just a bit with a touch of “I know I’m good” pride, as she continued to spew off ideas for how to sell these and make tons of money. I started to think I was about to be pastry-famous, the sort of fame John wanted for me, that we would be waved into a restaurant.

Throughout the evening, various people commented on the desserts, and I tried not to hover around the dessert table too much, so people wouldn’t feel totally obligated to comment. I didn’t necessarily need comments, but I guess I liked them just the same. One thing that was interesting was the mixed results of the caramel apple tart…most people loved it, but hated that it dribbled down their chin. The other tart that seemed to get a mixed result was the chocolate espresso pear, but it was dark in the space, and my thought was that people couldn’t really see what it was. People who tried it seemed to like it, and I knew that my coworker Darwin had told me that that was the best thing I had ever made. So I was unphased by the mixed response to that tart.

Next Steps

I had to decide whether it was worth it to go to cooking school. I had taken a class at Blue Ribbon Cooking School with pastry chef William Leaman, formerly of Essential Baking Company. We learned how to make several classic French cookies. The first was Sable Bretons, which could also be used as a tart crust and could be either cut into shapes or formed into logs for slice and bake cookies. We also learned about financiers, which were easily used as a tart filling or as their own cookie. Financiers were baked in special pans, and you could also sink whatever fruits you had into the batter. We also made madeleines, which were also baked in special shell shaped pans. For some reason, I don’t remember being too impressed with the madeleines, but they were good when they were very fresh. What I remember most about the class was that these were just basic things that you could do anything you want with…that the sky was the limit. This fit with how I baked because I never really followed the recipe in its entirety, and I was always mixing and matching fillings with crusts and such.

Around the same time, I took a business class at the community college adult education division. The instructor seemed a bit new at teaching, and he had this funny habit of repeating himself several times, sometimes even within the same sentence. He would also smile a bit after he said something so I got the feeling he just liked hearing his own voice and being in front of a few people while he spoke. We got to take home one of his books, “Business Plans for Lemonade Stands”. I liked the book title because I like lemonade and have always felt that if people can learn how to make and sell great lemonade, they can do anything. Turns out the book was written just like the author spoke: random uncollected stream of consciousness notes on a few general ideas about running a business. But despite the shortcomings of the class, in the end it was good to have a few hours a week to sit in a room and think about what my business would be. I remember there was this guy who was starting a Pho restaurant, and there was another guy who was going to start a doctor’s office. The attendance was really low towards the end of the 6 weeks, and I remember thinking that these people who don’t show up aren’t serious about starting a business.

In February 2003, I wrote a business plan for Sugar. As typical Seattlites, we frequented espresso shops, and noted that they usually had a very poor selection of baked goods. We thought this was odd that places with very high end and pricy drinks had such not so elegant baked goods. None of the pastry offerings ever seemed as special as the coffee drinks. We talked this over with several of our friends, and some people in the industry, and most people agreed that there could possibly be an opportunity, although we were warned that the volumes of pastries for espresso shops were small. Nonetheless, we decided to sell French style tarts mostly to espresso shops, and I began schooling myself on the art of making pastry professionally.

Culinary school crossed my mind again, but I had already had a Masters in Photography and didn’t do anything with that degree. There comes a point in one’s life where you are supposedly able to figure it out on your own. Plus, there would be about 6 months of waiting to get into a program, in addition to the two years in the program itself. Self-schooled, I could learn what I wanted at my own pace, so armed with a book on baking chemistry that I had picked up on my lunch hour, I set to work learning about crust, fillings, and anything that would help me fix mistakes and such that invariably came up when working with food.

The Inspiration


It started with a trip to Hawaii. Everything we did centered around food: malasadas, plate lunch, manapua, poi. We ate and took turns reading the Tao of Pooh. We knew something was going to have to change. We would have to start from square one.

And then there was danger. Every good story needs danger. Danger on the plane ride back when we hit code four turbulents, which John secretly knew meant there would be damage to the plane. There was that woman crying behind us, and the woman in the next aisle trying to gulp down her Chablis. By the look on her face, she was clearly not amused. She had really hoped to savor it; instead, it was down the hatch. All the way, I’m holding John’s hand, visualizing the plane jetting smoothly through the air pockets. Finally, we were safe.

I had been reading about starting a catering company. I had heard about this woman who had set up a small kitchen in a Home Depot shed and was baking apple pies once an hour and putting them on the ledge for anybody to take. Why did she do this? For art. That was cool. We had already catered our own wedding reception in Fall of 2002 and really impressed ourselves at how we didn’t know what we were doing, but still managed to pull it off. That was a rush.

We had a surplus of apples in the Fall of 2003. I had this idea of a caramel apple tartlet, and had baked a batch of them in muffin tins. John had a pot-luck at his work, and told me I should bake more of the apple tartlets, and pretend I was a dessert catering company. We went to dinner at the Ram sports bar and talked about what we would do. I thought about the woman baking apple pies and what it meant to be a woman and more importantly a girl. I thought about the essence of baking as an indulgence as opposed to cooking as a necessity. For me, baking was just that little extra something that made a meal memorable; to end it on a sweet note (corny as that sounds). I wanted simplicity and it was sitting right there on the table in front of us. A packet of sugar. That was it.

Turns out there were no other bakeries in the US using the name Sugar. There were a few with sugar in their name, but certainly none with just the word sugar. And there were certainly no other bakeries called Sugar in Seattle at the time. I remember that jittery feeling of excitement to want something and simultaneously realize I might be able to have it too. So I cut out some business cards, baked several dozen apple tarts, and sent my husband to his pot luck with my second batch of apple tarts. The response was very positive.

From the beginning


I spent a few hours looking through my recipes and realized I had amassed quite a substantial stack. On the corner of my desk was essentially the history of Sugar for the past 3 years, and it made me think about all the trials and tribulations I’d gone through with opening a bakery without any experience, and how such an obsession to succeed at something I’m passionate about had affected who I am today. This seemed an excellent chance for me to revisit the past few years, and see if I have learned anything.