bake - March 2012 - 32

Utilize what you have Catering offers an easy addition to the retail bakery business. Delivering large quantities of product not only creates revenue by moving baked goods out of the shop, but it also sets up the bakery for repeat high-volume business. “We have a 1,500 sq ft building that’s also on our property and was used as a training
Roll out new products and services slowly. Focus on marketing and promotion when they begin to run smoothly within day-to-day operations.

too much at ﬁrst,” Polletta says, “because we didn’t want to get slammed and not be prepared for it.” As Edgewood added new offerings, Polletta slowly let people know. He wanted enough new business to get things rolling and work out the kinks without getting behind on the day-to-day operations. Once the additions started running smoothly, he ramped up promotions. “We’re right now in the process of hitting hard on Facebook and Twitter and really going out after it,” Polletta says. Signage for Edgewood followed the same pattern as advertising and promotions, moving slowly as things progressed and careful not to promote too much too soon. “As we started the catering, we had more signs put on the building,” Polletta says. “I have one other sign ordered now for the corner.” Edgewood’s involvement in its community has allowed it to subtly promote by word of mouth at local meetings and in the local newspapers as well. “My biggest fear was to put out a big spread and not be ready for it,” Polletta says. “Your ﬁrst initial experience is so important. I didn’t want people to come here and have to wait an hour for food because we had more people than we could handle.” Financing change

room,” Polletta says. “We had always rented that space for meetings and supplied them with sweets, coffee and tea.” The companies that rented the space from Edgewood soon requested lunch meetings. Once Edgewood agreed, the catering business was born. “We had to come up with a small kitchen for that, so we

started doing the lunches, and that just grew to the point that we had to enlarge the kitchen and we hired a chef,” Polletta says. Edgewood converted its meting space into a banquet hall that now services birthday parties, anniversaries, small weddings and other events. “Once we started getting into the catering and we hired a chef,” he says. “We had to make better use of our assets, so we had to give him more to do.” Baby steps Slowly and methodically, Edgewood grew according to what it felt it could handle. The initial kitchen took about 33% of the baking area. When Polletta needed to enlarge the kitchen to accommodate growth, including a bistro in the evenings, he used existing space. “We went back into the storeroom and took some of that,” Polletta says. “The cost was minimal, because we didn’t have to change the outside of the building or add plumbing or any of that stuff.” The basic equipment he needed was already there. “We just had to make it work for what we wanted to do,” Polletta says. Before spending too much time and money on advertising, marketing and promotions, Polletta wanted to make sure Edgewood could handle the new business while maintaining the bakery’s dedication to quality. “We got them off the ground here and we’ve promoted them, but we didn’t want to promote them

Financing your reinvention will likely prove difficult in the scope of today’s economy. Although it shows signs of evening out, lenders are still wary when it comes to loaning money in the foodservice industry. “It’s very hard — if not almost impossible — to get any kind of loans from the bank for foodservice,” Polletta says. “So many restaurants are going out of business; they don’t want to loan you money.” However, there are other ways to ﬁnance. Edgewood had to ﬁnance its changes through cash ﬂow. This required strategizing from different angles and ﬁguring out less conventional ways of procuring ﬁnances. Polletta and his family (wife, Sandra, and daughter Krysti are co-owners) took money from their retirement fund as necessary. Believing in the need — and in the bakery’s plan — this bold move facilitated Edgewood in bringing the complete transformation to fruition. “If it works, hooray for us, if it doesn’t, we gave it a shot,” Polletta says.

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