Made by hand and delivered by bike. Despite living in a coronavirus world, a small team of bread bakers in San Luis Obispo are seeing a rise in their community supported bakery.
Follow the smells in the Creamery Marketplace and you’ll find baker, biker, and co-owner of Bread Bike, Sam DeNicola hard at work getting ready the day’s deliveries.
"We really really love making bread and we also love sharing bread with people. That energy gets transferred to food," DeNicola said. Made with 100% organic and local ingredients, DeNicola is proud of being able to find the right grain for the bread and borderline scientific on the approach of baking.
"The fermentation process is slowed down which brings out more complex flavors and makes the bread more digestible."
It's one thing to bake the bread. It becomes another thing to deliver the goods. Sharing the kitchen space with Joliene Bakery, it means Bread Bike doesn't have a brick and mortar location to purchase its bread. Instead, like it's name, Bread Bike is a delivery service.
Members can sign up for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly deliveries straight to their door. When the business first began, DeNicola would do the job of baking and biking just to get the dough rolling.
"When I first started at my house, I would do some pretty ridiculous routes where I would bike to one side of town all the way to Tank Farm and then go to Bishop just because I wanted to make bread for anyone."
With the world going through a pandemic, it means DeNicola and co-owner Mariah Grady have seen the delivery demand rise.
"It's honestly my dream. It's pretty cool to be building more community around this business," Grady said.
Matt Murray delivers the bread now. "Our current route is just under 30 miles," he said.
The Central Coast views are tough to beat, especially when you have the smell of fresh bread in tow.
"It's gorgeous. The neighborhoods are super cute," Murray said. "Sometimes I'll drop off at the door and other times I'll see that they get it and they just light up. They're always so thankful and it seems like its the time of the week they're excited for."
Bread Bike is expanding and has recently partnered with Blosser Urban Garden to be added to its produce box, making it available in the Santa Maria area.
