Category — Building the Bakery

It’s Ukranian Christmas today, or more accurately, Christmas Day according to the Julian Calendar.   I figured it was a good time to share the latest email that went out to our Bootnik email list on December 29. The Bootnik list is the best way so far to get the latest Orange Boot Bakery news delivered straight to your email inbox.  If you haven’t yet, why not subscribe today?

Happy Holidays!

We hope you’re all having a great holiday week.  We were going hard at the bakery right up till Christmas Eve then took a couple days off to be with our family and recharge a little.  Then it’s been back to the bakery to paint, assemble equipment and clean.  We’re always cleaning.  I’m sure our shop will be cleaner than the first day the mall opened, but it’s worth it.

Opening Day is Getting Close

We’re not 100% sure when opening day is, but it’s not too far off.  If all goes well we’ll be ready to start bringing flour and other ingredients into the shop in a week or so.  Opening in mid-January is our best guess at this point.

We’ll be letting people know via the Bootnik email list: if you haven’t yet,  please sign up and you won’t miss a thing!

In the Meantime

It’s not good bread, but at least here’s a hint of how your bread will be baked.  Last week we took delivery of our MIWE Condo bread oven.  Built in Germany, used for a week at the IBIE baking conference in Las Vegas, then delivered to Regina via New Jersey and Toronto.  The last 50 feet were the toughest as Cindy, her dad Chris and a great forklift operator threaded the needle to get this large oven through a surprisingly small door opening.   Cindy was calm enough to film parts of it — it’s not White Christmas but it’s not bad either.  Can you feel the tension?

Happy New Year!
2010 has been a crazy adventure for us as we finally took the plunge to open Regina’s first artisan bread bakery.  2011 will no doubt be even wilder when we start baking for you and get serious about bringing you the best bread we possibly can.  Your emails and phone calls keep us going; thank you so much for your support over the past two months.

We wish you huge success and happiness in 2011.  If we can add a wee bit of great taste and nutrition to your best year ever, then we’ll be very happy indeed.

An email went out to the Bootniks today with an update on the bakery.   There’s a short form for the veterans and a longer email for the hundreds of subscribers who joined the Bootnik list in the past two weeks.   I also shot a brief video walkthrough of the space, which should be appearing below.  Enjoy!

Watch the video direct in YouTube by clicking here.

Lots of work to go on the bakery itself along with this website.  If there are any WordPress developers out there looking to do some pro-bono (or nearly so, or in exchange for bread) work to earn the unending praise of Regina bread lovers, please fire me an email!

Still not a Bootnik? Howcomewhy? Become a Bootnik here!

Boy do we ever get asked that a lot.  There was a time where we didn’t want to go to the store for fear of seeing one of you and getting the question.

We love to make you smile

Without a doubt, the best part of baking every Friday was getting to see you every week and hear your stories about how you liked what we were doing.  We especially loved the stories where you shared bread with a friend and they loved it too.

That’s the neat thing about our bread — it’s even better when you share it.

Our friend Beth told us a story last month about finding a loaf of our bread buried in the bottom of her freezer and how much her family loved it.  The loaf was likely from our Christmas bake last December; while we don’t recommend freezing our bread for 10 months, we’re glad to hear that it was still tasty!

Where to from here?

When we added the 100th person to our bread list last year we thought “Eureka!  That proves Regina loves great bread and everyone is craving a real artisan bread bakery in the city!”  So we stopped baking and ran off to talk to bankers, equipment suppliers and landlords.

We thought it would be a short hiatus from baking till we got the store opened and then we’d be back to making you smile every week and making new friends.

In the event, it was much harder than we thought.  We looked at a dozen locations and dug deep into three locations in the past year.  It was a Goldilocks experience; too small, too big, zoned incorrectly and, in the case of River Heights Mall, a landlord who wanted nothing to do with another bakery in his mall.

This August, we finally gave up.  Decided that it just wasn’t going to work, so let’s stop fretting and never speak of it again.

And then it happened

Once we officially, finally, gave up, it only took two days.   Cindy sent Mark on a bike ride north to check out a renovation on Saskatchewan Drive.  Mark, who rarely listens closely, rode south looking for a renovation on Gordon Road.  He didn’t find it, of course.  But he did find a space for lease that was “just right.”

So the bankers got called back.  The equipment suppliers got emailed.  And we started reviewing lease agreements.   On November 1, we got a set of keys and a huge mortgage.  We’re in business.

Announcing Orange Boot Bakery.  For Real!

Our new address is 3904 Gordon Road, in the Albert Park Plaza strip mall.  Today we tell people “you know, the little mall with Sparky’s restaurant that used to be the Brown Derby?”  It’s our hope that in a few years people will say “you know, the little strip mall with Orange Boot Bakery?”

It’s a nice little space with lots of natural light and an intimate feel to the place.  If you drive by today, you’ll see an empty shell with JR’s Convenience Store over the door.  But not for long!

A small bread shop, built for you (and people like you)

Our vision is for a nice, small, European style bread shop where you can get the best bread, a nice pastry and maybe a cup of coffee.  Cookies and muffins made with the same care you use at home.  Fresh fruit tarts in fresh fruit season.  Savory buns and turnovers for a quick lunch or snack.

There are bakeries like this all over Canada, from Victoria to Halifax to Whitehorse.  Even in Saskatoon.  It’s time we had one in Regina.  And very soon, we will!

Our schedule shows us being open in January 2011.  We’re hoping to get things ready in time for a ‘soft opening’, exclusively for you Bootniks on the email list, in mid-December.  That way you can have some good bread for the holidays.

Will you help us?

I know you share our vision because you are the people who gave us the vision.   Now we need your help to spread the word and get more people excited about what we’re doing.

Please forward this email to all your friends who love great bread.  Let them in on the secret – they’ll love you for it!  Invite them to sign up to our email list so they can be a Bootnik too.  There’s a signup form at our website, or they can just click here to go straight to the signup form.

Finally, let us know what you think – now, when we’re planning our bread lineup and later after we open.  You’re our friends, customers and Board of Directors.  We love hearing from you!

We had a bake sale today at The Day Job to kick off the Christmas festivities.  Cindy’s treats were a huge hit.  She’s been researching smaller sweet items for the holidays and tried three new items.  The best of the bunch was a chocolate cookie dipped in icing and roasted almonds at one end — they sort of look like a lit cigar although they don’t taste like one at all.   They’re fun to eat in three small bites — the first taste is almonds, followed by chocolate and almonds, and finally pure chocolate.   Yum!

No surprise to you that it’s been a while since we’ve baked for you all.   We really miss it.  The best part of the bake sale was seeing the joy in the eyes of the folks who bought our baking.  That’s the best part of our bread baking too.  Not connecting up with you makes this journey to opening even longer.

Goldilocks and the Road to a Real Bakery

Over the last four months we worked long hours getting a lease in place, but with no real success.  We’ve had two opportunities fall through:  a too-small site near downtown which found us caught between a zoning issue and an impatient landlord, and a too-large site near Taylor Field in which the landlord was wonderful but the building was too large, too soon.

While we learned a lot with both sites and met some very helpful people, we’re still searching for a ‘just right’ location.  Or maybe ‘good enough’ is a better way to put it.  Big enough for an oven, mixer, refrigeration and, of course, a place for customers to stand, and maybe park nearby.  But not so large we go broke paying rent.

We’ve got a couple more leads to follow up, and one space with great potential but a very reluctant landlord.  So hopefully we’ll have more information to share soon.

Announcing the Bootnik email list

When we started this site I made a few beginner mistakes around keeping everyone in the loop.  I spent some time this fall getting everything pulled together so that all of you can get consistent updates without our email account getting tagged as a spammer.

We’re now using an email provider called Mailchimp to send out the emails to everyone who’s on our Orange Boot email list — that is, the (Orange) Bootniks!

People who subscribed to website updates are Bootniks too — we don’t want you to miss out on news and insider info (like the quite-possible-almost-for-sure Bread For The Holidays event.)  This means website subscribers *might* be getting some updates twice, from the website and the Bootnik list.   If this happens often and it bothers you, fire me an email and I’ll fix things up for you.

One More Thing

I almost forgot — if you’re not signed up to our Orange Bootnik list yet, now’s the time!  Be the first person on your street to learn about when we finally open the best Artisan Bread bakery in Regina.   Either use the box in the upper right corner of the website or click this link.  Your neighbours will think you’re way cool!

Photo by tannazie

Well…Hi there!

Although I’ve spoken to a great many of our friends and customers over the past year, I haven’t posted to the site in a very long time.  This has caused a bit of worry with people who discovered the website and thought they missed out on some fun (and great bread.)  I get a couple emails a month from people asking if we’re still baking.

Are we still baking in the brick oven? Yes and No.  We’ve done a few bakes for special occasions, but we’re not baking on a regular schedule.

Are we going to open a full time bakery? Very good question!  It looks like…YES!

We still have a lot of work to do, not least of which is settling on a location.  But we’re working hard at it — picking a location, sourcing equipment, getting the financing in place, etc.  I think we have the dominos lined up so that once we settle on the location, the rest can fall pretty quickly.

Our dream site at the River Heights Mall fell through back in May — the landlord has other plans for the mall that doesn’t include world class bread and baked goods  If you feel differently, perhaps you can tell him   But you know, once that option officially died it actually opened up some new ideas for us.  I guess we were stuck on one place so much that we couldn’t see the opportunity in other sites.

We’ve also been talking with other bakers.   Second generation bakers and rookies who have been open less than a year.  So we’re feeling much more confident that we can be open and baking for you before I need to post a Summer 2010 update.

In the meantime, please drop us a line if you want to chat, either with a comment on the website or via email.  Words of encouragement are welcome, as is a kick in the pants once in a while — your choice!