new fall directions...

wow... i guess august was busy, eh? no blog posts all month! crazy...

anyway... looks like there are outside factors at work that are helping us make some of the harder decisions about what we're gonna do around here.

the hardest decision of them all is/was... do we stop or continue to provide retail "grab-n-go" sweets like a proper bakery??

Here's the truth of the matter... we never intended to continue being a "proper bakery" when we bought the "proper bakery" three and a half years ago... we saw this great place, and instantly had a vision of what we could turn it into.

So now... three years later... we're realizing that vision but have also maintained almost all the retail baking that we started with, as well as grown the wedding cake/occasion cake side of the business by accident.

So what's the problem? Well... #1. Time. Operating a "real" restaurant does not leave a lot of time to also operate a "real" bakery... at least not with the same amount of staff. #2. Space. The storage space required for the ingredients & packaging for both bakery & restaurant exceeds what we can comfortably manage. #3. Refrigeration. We cannot install a walk-in cooler nor freezer due to the configuration of our space and the fact that to VENT these things we'd have to go through the apartment upstairs or through the concrete exterior wall, which happens to be underground... both scenarios costing WAY more than we can afford. That means, we have to rely on stand-alone units... three of which we lost over the course of this very hot summer. Most recently the only freezer we had that would accommodate full trays of sweets (the size they are when they're made before they get cut down to service size).

This most recent "death" has led to the current crux... we've got nowhere to STORE the sweets between when they're made and when they're put out for sale... and because of time issues, making small batches isn't really efficient because, for one, i'd have to make nanaimo bars every other day to keep up!!

So that then leads to...

a) do we stop making nanaimo bars (and all the others) altogether??? i think we might get lynched if we did that.
b) do we reduce the number of available sweets and rotate the selection? that might be the most logical and least unpopular option.
c) do we find a new baker who has their own commercial kitchen and contract out our recipes & the storage?? that might work but would most definitely put the prices up.
d) do we change our selection entirely to items that are simpler to make in small batches and still cost effective? this might work...

We don't want to price ourselves out of the market - we are by no means "pastry chefs" so creating desserts that end up costing too much per serving because we're only making a dozen at a time because they take so long doesn't make any sense...

We don't want to lose our customers who only come here for the desserts, tho because of our dwindling and inconsistent supply over the summer, maybe that's already happened...

We don't (at least right now) want to start a whole new line of products that we find we can't keep up with and end up going thru this process again...

so what DO we want?

We want our customers to be happy. We want them to know they can count on us to have their favourites pretty much any time they come in. We want them to come back regularly. We want them to tell their friends. We want to focus on lunch & dinner, and special desserts for in-house service.

Any suggestions on how we do ALL that?

thoughts are welcome & encouraged.