Moscow Food Co-op Supplier Profile

by Gary Chang, from the June 2001 newsletter

Several years ago, Charles Tomlinson - or "Bud," as he prefers to be called - decided to leave his U. S. Forest Service job and start a different career. After considering some different possibilities, he decided to start a bakery.

"I was over in Montana, in a bakery, and I liked the looks of it," says Bud. "It was really kind of by chance more than anything else."

Bud learned to make bread by taking classes at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and by working at a bakery in the Portland area. Then, almost two-and-a-half years ago, he started the Sage Baking Company in Clarkston, Washington.

"This is the first bakery that I've owned. It's a new business for me, so I'm kind of learning as I go."

The Sage Baking Company is located on 6^th and Diagonal in Clarkston. It is both a bakery and a retail store. The store is open from Tuesday to Saturday and typically offers between seven and ten types of breads for sale. The different breads include familiar ones—such as white, sourdough, and rye—as well as more exotic breads like kalamata olive.

The location is easily accessible, which is important in attracting customers. Once inside, the space has been designed to allow customers to watch people make the breads and pastries. "I like that people are able to see that there's something that goes into the products that we make. It's a very open area … the only problem is that the flour goes everywhere," Bud laughs.

Most of the breads are free-form, which means that they not baked in a pan and require particular hands-on attention. Bud describes the process starting with the dough.

"You have to give it some shape and form in order for it to come out as okay-looking bread."

Before the dough goes in the oven, it is scored. Scoring involves cutting into the loaf to cause it to expand in the right directions. Finally, the bread is baked in a special deck oven. If something goes wrong with any step of the process, the result will be a loaf that has spilled out of the top or the sides. Bud and his employees bake several hundred nicely-shaped loaves each day.

The recipes for the bread have been developed by reading and by trial and error. Changes are made on a daily basis.

"I modify them all the time - they never stay the same," says Bud.

Some of the sourdoughs and others are made using starters. "What the starter is doing on a given day will affect how the dough is developed, so that makes it a little more interesting, too. There's nothing given on any particular day, you've just gotta figure out what's working and make adjustments."

What remains consistent is the quality and wholesomeness of Sage breads. No fats or preservatives are added to them.

As with most small businesses, economics has presented some challenges and surprises to the Sage Baking Company. For example, one of the difficulties Bud has is balancing his costs and the price to customers. Most of the cost to the company comes from the labor involved with making bread (remember, the great majority of their breads and pastries are hand-made). In addition, new employees usually need a good deal of training in bread-making techniques. Thus, labor is reflected in the price of the bread to customers. But of course, the price of the bread can't be too high, or customers wouldn't buy it.

Fortunately, Bud has been pleasantly surprised with the strength of the retail sales at the Clarkston store. Currently, retail sales account for about 70 percent of the Sage Baking Company's business.

Bud has enjoyed the challenges of his new career. "Everything that we do can be duplicated by a machine someplace else," but the quality wouldn't be the same. "I'd like to think of us as a business that's very specialized, that's based upon producing very high quality products."

For those of us who don't live in Clarkston, Sage Baking Company bread is delivered twice a week to the Co-op. We even get Bud's favorite, the kalamata olive bread. Bud is also working toward opening a new location in Pullman.

Gary Chang is a post-doctoral entomologist at the University of Idaho.

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