…your support as it is keeping us going right now!!
Phew! We kind of made it through a manic Small Business Saturday 7th December – our busiest & biggest bake so far!! We want to sincerely thank all Rex friends, both existing and new, who put up with a rather chaotic order collection point & stall today.
A manic morning for Small Business Saturday
Right from the 1st blog entry, nearly 6 months ago now, we said that we would share with you the trials & tribulations as well as the triumphs of setting up a new Artisan Bakery business.
Well following a very hard day’s night, which started for the Rex Baker before many of you went to bed and was still going when his family got up the next morning, the volume of orders & baking planned to feed a hungry Little Chalfont community meant honestly we faced a few teething problems for the pop up point this week. These included:
Mistakes in bag packing. Baking was backed up so that some of the week’s most popular items (Sparkling Sticky Willies (left), Sausage Rolls, Multiseed etc) were not ready for packing into bags early enough. We could only part-pick initially and inevitably, when we came to complete the bags, there was some confusion & a couple of inconvenient mistakes made for our dear Rex friends 🙁
Once alerted, we re-audited all the bags at the pop-up point to double check remaining orders for collection were 100% accurate
It’s a long time since we made bag packing mistakes, we have the picking & packing off to a tee normally now and are absolutely committed to Click & Collect option once the shop opens. That’s because the Rex Baker can’t stand waiting in queues and would like that option himself if he was his own shopper!- Limited slicing. Some of the loaves that required slicing for orders were baked up to 2 hours later than usual due to the volumes of all products being finished off, and so were still too warm when it came to slicing them for some orders. This caused the bread slicing machine to have a melt-down and we were unfortunately unable to supply all slicing requests 🙁
- Delayed pop-up point start time. We had planned to pack up all the baked spares and take them with all orders down to the pop up point and be there, with a cleaned area & stall set-up from 8.30ish. But given the ovens couldn’t cope with all the demand, at that time we were still baking! We updated the blog & emailed all the order list to delay the timings, but it was actually even later again before we were there & ready to start passing out orders to waiting Rex friends and to serve those passing by. What a kind, forgiving group our Rex friends are, thank you!!
- Salty balls! The Rex Baker prepared a few special extras for the pop-up point customers including some chelsea buns/ currant whirls which he tops off with caster sugar – except that in the last minute melee they got mistakenly topped with sea salt instead. Very fortunately none of these were in pre-orders, and we only sold a few before a kind customer alerted us… but we don’t know who some of the other new Rex customers were that also bought them, so please, if that’s you & you’re reading this, do let us know here who you are as we are really really sorry & we promise to make amends to you!!
So a day that was not without its challenges, and showed us that the most important bakery developments are going to be… the new bigger ovens & more bakers to work with Rex !!
That said, it was an absolute joy to see how warmly welcomed Rex Artisan Bakery is going to be in that location in the village; to meet & offer samples to so many wonderful customers, older & younger (left); for the Rex Baker to produce that much totally hand-made great tasting bread & buns (best ever ciabattas…) & to virtually sell out soon after Noon.
Thank you to all & now on to the Seasonal list!
