First month in the brick & mortar

On Monday, May 12, 2025, we opened Batch 22 for our soft opening. At 2:30 in the afternoon, it was a CRAZY moment seeing a line FILLED with so many of our regular customers. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. We are so honored to have a place in your lives - for so many of you to travel from afar (SF, petaluma, etc.) on a weekday afternoon. That day, we sold out in the first hour and we kept baking as customers kept waiting for cookies. That week we continued to have lines as long as an hour wait, spanning for several hours. We had never seen anything like it. 

Everything breaks at scale

In that first week, everything broke at the scale we were producing (hooray, good problem!). In this new space, our staff were trained but we were all unfamiliar with everything: the larger mixers, the larger quantities and weight of dough, how long everything took, where our ingredients were, how much of each ingredient to buy (so many panic buying that week -we ran out of ingredients daily). We felt so slow - everyone was working ridiculous hours pitching in. It was like going to war in the back of house. And we could hardly make dough while we were baking from 6am through the afternoon.

Baking and mixing dough

Over that first week, we figured out the cadence of baking: a larger morning bake of all flavors, and then baking by feel - prioritizing having a variety of flavors available at all times. We also spent late nights mixing dough. In the beginning of the week, we were only able to make 5 batches in a day. By the end of the week, we made 15 batches in a day and our baking cadence was working for us. By Sunday, we finally overshot the demand and didn’t sell out in the first few hours. Big thank you to our first staff member ever - hired in 2021 - she came back from Truckee to save us that week and work LONG shifts as I was pulled in so many directions between front & back of house.

Dough storage

Dough storage was a crazy problem in the first 3 days - we had speed racks in our fridge & freezer, but the one in the freezer wouldn’t close if we put in large trays. We bought a bunch of 2/3 trays to stack the dough, but the speed rack was really the most efficient solution for our volume. One of our staff was our mechanical engineer fairy - she removed something from our freezer to make large trays viable. We had planned to saran wrap our trays of dough, but the wrap would snag on the speed rack. I ended up getting basically large food-safe plastic bags and gentle painter’s tape to store our dough. Happy to report this is still working well.

All systems go

By week 2, we no longer had crazy lines - the foot traffic had turned into a lovely constant trickle. Knowing that we could produce so much dough got us into our groove and all of our processes and systems were in working order again. All the habits we had built up over years of production surfaced: scaling ingredients the day before, knowing when to multitask, following our checklists. Our error rate was astonishingly low - 99% of our batches were very consistent. I’m particularly proud of this. Anyone can make a cookie, but to do it the same way every time is the challenge. I spent several weeks in the fall creating and refining documentation for our recipes and a solid 8 hours just scaling up and formatting the recipes. It is by far the most unsexy part of my job, but the part that gives us such consistency.

Staffing

By week 3, we had been producing so much dough that we didn’t have fridge/freezer space to make more. We were overstaffed. We had hired just the right amount of people to open the store and barely get through opening week (and I do mean barely), but staffing poses a huge sustainability problem. Frankly, if we didn’t dial in the staffing, there would be no bakery in a few weeks. We’re managing this closely so I’m excited to get it stable in the next couple weeks.

Managing both the guest experience and kitchen experience

Our customer-facing staff are almost purely trained by Lawrance, and after seeing the last 2-3 weeks pan out, I realize we are incredibly lucky to be both all hands on deck. This job is quite expansive to run the store in a very specific way (with good service in the front and high consistency + high efficiency in the back). As we say often, there would be no cookies without Amy, and no business without Lawrance!

Online & large orders

On our grand opening day, we made the mistake of turning on online ordering. Within the hour, we knew we couldn’t handle it. But after week 2, we tried again and we were able to fulfill online and walk-in orders :) And I got to make the online and in-person experience a little more seamless. We’re already open for large orders, and I’m so happy with the scale we’re able to achieve in a very short amount of time. Also thankful for the folks who waited for us to open, to secure an order for their wedding :") 

Biggest pain points

In month 1, I expected it to be all hands on deck, but we’re ahead of schedule. It’s still really annoying to run out of ingredients and to do full inventory checks (between packaging supplies, ingredients, and so many miscellaneous items) but I’m hoping to get some systems in place to flag low inventory with ease. The other issue we have is that our scale doesn’t always have enough capacity for our dry ingredients. It’s not only a giant pain, but also expensive.

What our first month was likeWeek 1 was everything, everywhere, all at once. It was so happy and surreal to feel so much support from customers I’d met over the years!! Between that and all the flowers sent by friends, family, customers - it all meant the world to me. It was also monstrously grueling to be working 16-18 hour days and barely eating. Between front of house and back of house, panic-buying ingredients, selling out too fast, and having new staff and no one knowing the space well, it was a lot. But it remains the greatest honor of my life to be able to look after this bakery in its entirety: the online experience, the service in-store, the consistency of the cookies, the variety of our flavors, the cleanliness of our kitchen and enforcing hairnets, how the staff treat each customer, the systems and processes that keep us running efficiently. Each day, the problems we face are the problems of our choosing. There are many ways to run a bakery but we choose to care about most things, and that is very very fulfilling.

Thank you for being the best customers in the world. We could not ask for more and look forward to seeing you in store :)

- Amy & Lawrance