This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Bakery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
In brief: The good news is, we’re turning into fairly decent gluten-free bakers. The bad news is, even though we’re making more stuff, better, faster, our prices are going up. And no matter how much we bake, we still seem to sell out every Sunday afternoon!
Full Story: Elaine Monarch of the CDF once called to tell us she’d been traveling and speaking to other GF-bakers on the east coast, and she wanted us to know that gluten free baking is hard. It was an surprisingly thoughtful thing to say, and such a relief to hear that it wasn’t just us, but that even Mr. Ritts might have found this job a challenge at first.
Elaine’s encouragement kept us going through many a tray of gummy focaccia!
These days, thank G-d, the breads and cakes are all coming out consistently wonderful. We did take some things off the menu, either because they could not be made consistently wonderful or because they didn’t stay wonderful in your freezer. Like that focaccia. When it was good, it was incredible. (It’s the bread they featured in Los Angeles Magazine.) But some mornings, it wasn’t even fit for breadcrumbs. We’d sell what was edible, and hold up online orders waiting for more, and never really figured out why sometimes in the very same batch, one tray would be a disaster and another tray heaven.
“Just make more,” people would say when they saw our empty freezer. We did make more, but we threw it away.
Those days are so over.
Now we focus on what we do well, and make as much of that as we can. Even so our labor costs more than it “should.” (It’s supposed to be 25% of food sales. Ha! I laugh!) Abbye says that’s not unusual for Los Angeles.
At the same time, the cost of ingredients is squeezing bakeries of all sorts, gf or wheaty. Rice flour has gone up 20% from when we started a year ago, to more than $40 for a 50 lb. bag. Steve thinks it will go a lot higher. It’s not just flour, either. It’s eggs and evaporated cane juice and chocolate, everything.
So as much as it kills me to do this less than a year after we opened, we have to raise our prices. Quite a bit, actually. Here’s the new retail price list.
It’s not fair to do this right before the CDF event here March 9, so we’ll honor the old price list until then, but as of March 10 everything is going up.
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Edited late in the day: We fixed the focaccia!! It’s back and better than ever! It’s too late on a Friday for me to revise this post, but the new price list has been updated to include it again. So sorry for the confusion!
Remind me to tell you Sunday about what’s happened to the challah!
