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Scaling from 2 Loaves to 12: Lessons from Simply Bread | Episode 44

  • Dec 9, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


The first time you mix twelve loaves instead of two, something goes wrong. The dough is sluggish, or it runs away from you, and you cannot work out why, because you used the same recipe you have made a hundred times.


I sat down with Stijn Vanorbeek, the founder of the Simply Bread Company, and this was the problem he sees over and over from bakers who are growing. He is the person who invented the Simply Bread oven, and I use and love the Simply Bread app for my own orders.


What I did not expect was how much of our conversation was about business. How he validated a product before he built it, how he grew a brand with no advertising at all, and how he decides when a piece of equipment is worth the money. All of that applies to your bakery whether you ever buy his oven or not.


Build for five people first

Stijn had been baking in Dutch ovens in his garage, giving loaves away to neighbors, and getting more and more frustrated that he could not buy the kind of bread he grew up with in Belgium. When he went looking for a proper oven, the one real option had a twelve month lead time.


So he pulled out his grinder and welder and started working with steel.


Here is the part worth copying. He did not try to launch a company. He was working from Seth Godin's idea of a minimum viable audience, which means you build the thing for one person like yourself, then for three, then for ten, and you make those ten people genuinely happy. His plan was to build ten ovens and make his money back on the steel. The presale that followed ran to a couple of hundred units.


Your version of this is not an oven. It is the new flavor, the pastry box, the pre-order day. Make it for ten customers, make those ten thrilled, and let them tell you whether it is worth building out. That is a much cheaper way to learn than committing your whole menu to something nobody wanted.


The brand grew because he answered the phone

I asked Stijn how he built such a loyal following in the microbakery community. His answer was that there was no strategy.


He delivered the first twenty ovens himself, in his own truck. Customers thought he was the delivery driver. He wanted to plug each one in and make sure it worked. Everyone at his company, from the accountant to the supply chain manager, has come in and made dough and baked bread. They do not run advertising or PR.


He told me a story I have not stopped thinking about. A customer called their support line before ordering, just to see whether anyone would pick up. Someone did, and he placed his order.


That is the whole marketing plan for a small business, and it costs nothing but attention:

  • Answer the message, even when the answer is not what they hoped.

  • Do the follow-up after the sale, not just before it.

  • Fix the thing when it goes wrong, quickly, and without making the customer fight for it.

  • Care about what your customer is trying to build, not only about the sale in front of you.

Your customers will forgive a lot from a baker who clearly cares. They will not come back to one who feels like a vending machine.


What actually changes when you scale up

This was the most practical part of our conversation, and it explains most of the mystery failures bakers have on their first big bake.


At two loaves, everything in your kitchen is at room temperature and you never have to think about it. At twelve, the variables get loud:

  • Your flour is not room temperature. That bag has been sitting in a cold garage all winter. Cold flour plus cold water gives you a dough that ferments far slower than the one you are used to. Warm your water to bring the mix where you want it.

  • Your starter behaves differently in volume. A small jar on the counter stays warm on its own. A big reservoir of starter cannot get itself up to temperature, so it needs help, like a heat mat or a warmer spot.

  • A full oven is a completely different environment. Stijn pointed out that a full load means dropping something like two gallons of cold water into the oven at once. The temperature that works for a full bake will overbake a single loaf.

His fix is measurement. Take your dough temperature, take your baking temperature, write them down. Once you know the numbers that produce a good loaf, you can repeat them at any scale. If you do not know them at two or three loaves, twelve is going to be much harder.


He also said something about expectations that I think a lot of bakers need to hear. He visited a village baker in France with a wood fired stone oven, and those loaves would never make it onto Instagram. No dramatic ear, no showpiece scoring. They were wonderful bread. When you have two loaves you can spend ten minutes scoring them, and at twelve loaves that same scoring would take an hour you do not have. Some things simply do not come with you when you scale.


Deciding when equipment is worth it

Every baker eventually lands on the same question. Oven or mixer?


Stijn's answer on mixers is the one every baker gives, and I agree with it. Buy one size up from what you think you need, because three weeks after it arrives you will wish you had. On the oven, he made the case in two parts.


First is time. The thing customers tell him after the first bake is that they got their time back, because they are no longer sitting on the kitchen floor rotating Dutch ovens for twelve hours.


Second is the math. Once you are baking real volume, a three or four hour bake can bring in five or six hundred dollars, and after a few months the oven has absorbed its own cost.


That is his experience with his customers and not a promise about yours, so run your own numbers before you buy anything. What makes the decision sound is knowing your revenue per bake day and knowing which part of your process is the bottleneck. If you are torn on a purchase right now, I talk it through in Investing in Equipment. Is it Time to Level Up Your Microbakery?, and I list my own best and worst buys in My Worst Sourdough Microbakery Investments (and a Few of My Best).


One more thing he said that I want you to take him up on. Call your suppliers. They will help you with a baking problem or a scaling problem, or point you to someone who can. Most bakers never ask.


If you are a year or two in, this is your positioning

Stijn talked about wanting his values and his customers' values to line up. Short supply chains, food made near the people who eat it, knowing your miller or your farmer, selling inside a radius you can drive.


That is not a soft, feel-good detail. It is the reason your bread can cost more than the grocery store loaf and still sell out. Your customer is buying fresh food from a person they know, from a business in their own neighborhood.


So put it in your words. Name your mill on your label. Tell people where the grain comes from. Talk about the families down the street who are eating your bread tonight. Stijn described customers who drive around their neighborhood, see the lights on in the houses, and know those people are eating their bread. That is the feeling you are selling, and it is worth pricing accordingly.


He also thinks the sourdough movement is here to stay, and his reasoning was not about bread at all. People are tired of a food system that does not feed them well, and they want to be connected to their neighbors. His way of putting it stuck with me: it takes a baking oven to build a village.


Final thoughts

You do not need a factory or a patent to run your bakery the way Stijn runs his company. Build the small thing for ten people and make them happy. Answer the phone. Measure your dough temperature so you can repeat a good bake. Buy the equipment that gives you your evenings back, once the numbers say you can.


And when you scale, expect the dough to behave differently, because it will. That is not you failing. That is chemistry, and it is fixable with a thermometer and a notebook.


You can find Simply Bread at simply-bread.co, on Instagram, and in their Facebook community.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you liked this one, here are three more conversations worth your time.


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