This Bellefonte ‘micro-bakery’ is expanding to a brick-and-mortar shop
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- A Bellefonte-area “micro-bakery” is opening a new storefront along Potter Street.
- The bakery will continue local deliveries and offer in-store pickups and shopping.
- Owner David Anderson began baking as a hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What began as a pandemic-era side gig will soon become a brick-and-mortar bakery for David Anderson.
Perhaps better known online as the Bellefonte Bread Baker, Anderson is working toward opening a physical location for his micro-bakery, which currently offers a wide range of sourdough breads, bagels, pizza shells, English muffins and more. The bakery is moving into a small Bellefonte storefront at 167 S. Potter St., the former home of the short-lived Parlor ice cream shop.
Anderson, who works full-time as a chef in Penn State’s dining halls, said the new storefront will provide a central location for Bellefonte Bread Baker operations, including order pickups. His bakery will continue making deliveries to local customers but also open up for in-person shopping on Saturday mornings.
He said the storefront’s location, tucked away behind the CVS Pharmacy near Talleyrand Park, should be a perfect fit for his bakery.
“As a part-time business, it kind of works out better for me so that I don’t have people walking by every day who become disappointed that I’m not open,” Anderson told the Centre Daily Times.
Anderson began baking and selling bread to friends while stuck at home at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past few years, his at-home bakery has blossomed into a more demanding operation that solicits orders from local customers on Facebook and Instagram.
Changes to social media algorithms forced Bellefonte Bread Baker to begin using email newsletters to more easily stay in touch with customers in the area. Continued successes led him to put out a call for a potential commercial space, which was quickly answered by a landlord whose family had already been customers for years.
“I began using an email newsletter, and that very first week, my sales nearly doubled. That maintained for months,” Anderson said. “It was already a struggle working out of the house, and it got to the point where once the weather warmed up, I wasn’t able to keep up [with orders] and slow-proofing sourdough because it would happen too fast, and I didn’t have enough refrigeration space.”
Anderson will stock his new storefront with a mixer more than twice as large as the one he has at home, as well as three new ovens that are essentially a cross between residential and commercial use. The stone-hearth ovens provide heat on the top and bottom and provide the right kind of steam and ventilation to make artisan products.
“Everything you need to bake great bread is built into these ovens,” the baker said.
Using the new equipment presents an exciting challenge for Anderson, who says he needs to learn how his bread, cookies, croissants and more will react to upgraded ovens. He baked over the past few years using only residential ovens, which required a unique dance of sorts.
“One set of ovens holds steam, and the other ones don’t. You need steam to make good artisan bread, so all my bread had to start in this one oven before it got shuffled around into another one,” Anderson said. “Now, I need to learn a whole new dance with this set of ovens.”
Anderson said he hopes to eventually expand Bellefonte Bread Baker’s lineup of products, but producing more of its current favorites is a bigger priority for now.
Work continues at the Potter Street storefront, where Anderson and his wife are busy installing new equipment. The bakery must also pass a health inspection before opening to the public.
If all goes well, Anderson hopes to open Bellefonte Bread Bakery’s brick-and-mortar storefront by the end of May. He said any products that aren’t sold through preordered deliveries will be up for grabs during weekly open houses on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon.
Opening up the bakery to the public is a huge draw for Anderson, who said he hardly knows his customer base after years of baking. Bellefonte Bread Baker deliveries — a defining feature of the business — are largely contact-free after beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m excited about the open house aspect, because for years I never really saw my customers,” said Anderson, who lives just a mile away from the new shop. “It was like being a paperboy: I’d throw bread on people’s porches and leave. I had all these awesome customers I’d never met.”
You can visit BellefonteBreadBaker.com to learn more about the bakery’s products, sign up for its email newsletter and soon place orders for pickup at the new location. Follow the micro-bakery on Facebook and Instagram to see the latest updates as it works toward opening on Potter Street.
“I’m proud to have allowed the business to grow organically,” Anderson said. “Over the years, it’s grown way more than I ever thought possible.”
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