If It's Such a Good Idea, Why Doesn't It Exist Yet?

What We Need to Grow, Episode 072: Worth Doing Something First. A Founder Talk conversation with Tara Black. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

A Conversation with Tara Black, Founder of Origin Bakery

Caleb Pedosiuk: All right, so Tara, you've got a bakery, Origin Bakery, and you're in one of the most beautiful parts of Canada, out in BC. But here's my question. We were talking for a second about the difference between wet cold and dry cold in Canada. If anyone has experienced super cold, dry cold, like minus 30, minus 40, versus a damp cold like minus 5, you know what we're talking about. But this is the thing I was curious about: is sauna culture a thing? In my imagination there are beautiful saunas in Victoria, BC, down by the water. People get in the cold water, maybe they surf, they come out and sit in a sauna. Is that a thing, or is that still not quite a thing yet?

Tara Black: Oh no, it's a thing. It's a big thing. About five years ago, two different sauna companies launched in Victoria. One is actually on a barge, and the other one was in a small space in a condo building. Both took off. One is very much an experience; the other is more of a fitted-in lifestyle. Since then we've got four other sauna companies, and some are pop-ups.

On my dog walk along the Inner Harbour of Victoria, there's a sauna pod with a cold plunge and a single-person hot tub, and you're looking at the yachts in the international marina while everybody just walks past you. You can book a two-hour slot for $25. And then there's the huge barge downtown in the Inner Harbour, a big sauna space, where you can go for two hours for $140. So you've got everything in the mix right now. Sauna culture in Victoria is very healthy.

Caleb: There was a spot in Kelowna I came across last year, on a barge, sitting in the water. I think it was around $40 for an hour, capped at about six people, so you'd chat with whoever came in. The cold plunge was a part you'd walk into, so you were sitting right in the lake water. Once you get that opportunity to get super hot and sweating, that super sunny hot day sort of feel, and then you cool right off, you realize it doesn't matter if it's a rainy day or a snowy day. If anyone hasn't discovered that yet, it's a treasure.

Tara: Well, it's kind of similar to bakery culture. It's very hot in the kitchens when the ovens are going, so you have an opportunity to get your own professional sweat on, and then you end up walking into the walk-in cooler to cool down.

Caleb: The bakery version. Nice. Well, let's hear about the bakery. For some context, I love getting to have these conversations because I'm talking with founders across the whole spectrum: biotech, engineering firms doing cool stuff in aerospace, VCs, nonprofits rescuing kids out of human trafficking or feeding and educating the world. And then you have these pockets of businesses that serve such an important role. So many of them come out of some need, and I'd love a bit of your story of why a gluten-free bakery was important. Some of these businesses become part of the soul, the heart or soul of a community, whether it's a farmers market or a little town. It's the shop people love to go into. You open that door, you smell the coffee, you smell the baking. It's where connection happens. Not everything is a big software company. These smaller businesses, a little sauna company as an example, add to the richness of the ecosystem of life.

Tara: I think it's important to understand when small businesses become institutions in their communities. They take on more familiarity, and depending on the need that small business serves for someone, it becomes a staple in their life, or a staple in that community. So you end up with family diners that have been around for 75 years, not because the same person is involved, but because the community still finds it a desired need, generation after generation.

I find it interesting that everything from micro businesses through to people who have grown their businesses into multi-billion-dollar spaces, they all started here. It all started with a concept and an idea, and then it was about who had the vision and who had the community support to say this could grow.

I've been in this industry since I was 13. I've seen a lot of iterations of many different styles in the food and hospitality scene. I've worked everywhere from small coffee shops to five-star, four-diamond resorts, and the whole host in between.

When Origin Gluten-Free Bakery came into an idea, the simple idea was this. I'd served a lot of customers over the years, in all those different experiences, who were always happy with the end product. But we weren't able to serve them on a consistent basis. If it was a wedding cake or a graduation cake or some major celebration, we could do it. But if it was, I want to walk in after school and pick up a cookie, the businesses I worked for just didn't have the capacity to create really beautiful, tasty things while keeping safety as the main construct.

For people who don't know, gluten-free baking and traditional baking share so many similarities, but the biggest difference is the building blocks you're working with. The largest one we all think of is flour, which is just a term for a milled grain, and there are actually more gluten-free grains than there are grains that contain gluten. So when you take the gluten grains out of the mix, you end up with a huge variety, and a lot more chemistry, because they don't have that magical piece of gluten involved. Gluten is just a protein that allows everything to stretch and come back. When a piece of bread folds and springs back, that's the gluten.

So when people encounter gluten-free products, whether they're run-of-the-mill, somehow-this-made-it-onto-a-shelf, or really high quality, it's hard to find ones with that same texture, where if you bend it, it doesn't just crumble. What we've developed over the last 17 years are products where it's really hard to tell it's a gluten-free product. There are some things you'll never perfectly mimic, but we've come really close with 98% of what we do.

Caleb: And when did you start? Was it 2009?

Tara: We started recipe development in 2008, and then we launched a market stall in 2009. We opened the first store in 2010 and the second store in 2012, and we just keep going.

Caleb: How far would you say your reach is in terms of customers? Where are the people who have discovered you buying from?

Tara: We have an online store, and the point-of-sale system in our stores tracks where everybody's home is when they enter their addresses. We've had people from Asia and the UK place orders. Before COVID, we shipped across the country. Since then it's been a lot more challenging to get perishable goods to somebody's home in a guaranteed time, so right now we're only shipping within BC. We'd love to get back to sending out to Toronto; we used to have a number of clients there. And that's the reason for what we're doing now with the business, which is hopefully going to give people a lot more access no matter where they live.

Caleb: Over the time you've been doing this, you're certainly aware that your customers pay closer attention to ingredients than some. Are you seeing a trend where people are increasingly aware of, and maybe scrutinizing, the products they consume?

Tara: I think so. Over the last 10 years is where we've seen the biggest growth in customer knowledge, not just need or availability. There's a lot more available in the larger consumer market. If you go into a grocery store, you'll see a gluten-free area or a dedicated space, or gluten-free tagging down the aisles. The availability has really opened up, and with it the customer's education has exploded too.

I equate what we do versus what's happening in the wider gluten-free market to Wonder Bread versus an artisan bakery using heritage grains in a traditional way. There's a lot more product available, but the ingredient base is lower quality. It's made with hybrid starches, maybe white rice, something that's fairly cheap as a commodity to source and produce. We're working with grains that are four to five times the cost of a traditional ingredient base. They have a higher nutrition rate, a better shelf life, they definitely taste better, and the texture is excellent.

Caleb: Some producers are one degree away from the grower. How many degrees of separation are there between you and the families growing some of these grains?

Tara: Right now we're in the middle of talking with a millet grower in Alberta. We work predominantly with a local miller about 20 kilometres away from us. She and her husband mill six or seven of the grains we work with, fresh every week. The white buckets you see behind me are actually from them. Our eggs are all from the Cowichan Valley, about a 30-minute drive away. Our dairy is all from the local dairy co-op. The vegetables we use through the year, whether it's spinach for sandwiches or pumpkins for pies, or apples, are all from BC or the Island, or direct from a farm about 15 minutes away. We try to keep everything as locally sourced as possible, and as we grow, we're looking to create those same relationships in the new places. We want people to have access to what's available to them, while sourcing from their community to build those strengths up.

Caleb: In terms of other locations, how are you making decisions about the rate of growth? You mentioned earlier you like to get in the water and surf. One of the challenges entrepreneurs face is knowing when to say, when is enough? That self-awareness, looking at the numbers and your team, and asking how much of the current structure is load-bearing enough to handle more, and at what cost. Is it going to come at the cost of no longer being able to put the surfboard in the water this season? How are you navigating that?

Tara: I navigate it with my team. As we take on any development, I make sure there's actual bandwidth available, and we test it before we launch it. People always say, oh yeah, I can take it on, I have room, and then you find out it's actually pretty challenging, or that I need to change the way I've organized my day in order to accept anything new.

This business was built predominantly because, at the time, my kids were three and five. I was working in hotels at the executive level, working a lot of hours and not seeing my kids very often. I was paid well, but the paycheck didn't equate to the amount of time I was losing with them. So I left, with no idea I'd be doing this. After three or four months I realized I needed something to get my head in the game. Staying at home with the kids wasn't as enjoyable as I thought it would be. They're awesome and brilliant, but I needed another challenge to balance it out for myself.

So I thought, if we're going to do something and we want it to matter for the community, that's part and parcel of how this all came together. But it was designed so that I wasn't putting myself or my family back in the position I was coming out of. For the most part, I work 20 hours a week. And when we have new projects, like this franchise expansion, we make sure that as we build it out, we know how much time we're willing to give to its growth, without embedding it into our normal structure.

Caleb: Can you share a bit more about the franchising? What's the vision, and where is it at?

Tara: We worked with a company in Toronto on all our franchising agreements, so our licensing, paperwork and filings are all good to go. We're in talks right now with four different people across Alberta and BC about possible franchise licences: Edmonton, Nanaimo, Courtenay, and Vancouver, well, Richmond. We're hoping that over the next year and a half we see those spots start to emerge.

We're licensed to franchise across Canada, so where people see a demand or a need in their communities, we'll be able to help serve it. The interesting thing is that even with all the gluten-free awareness and advancement and growth and products out there, we're the first company to offer an entirely gluten-free franchise in North America, which to me feels kind of wild. But exciting.

Caleb: It'd be interesting to know how you gauge it, what data points are available. Sometimes there's a clue, some other factor in buying behaviour or a demographic, where when this is the case, you know that would be the case. A silly example: the amount of snowfall in a region might be a clue to how many snow blowers you could sell, or surfboards in an area. I know a lot of big companies are quietly data brokers now. Maybe there's data available about gluten-free buying behaviour in certain areas.

Tara: There are a lot of studies and a lot of stats. We do in-market data, but we use a lot of external data too. What we know, based on many studies in both the private and public sectors, is that about 3% of any given population needs a gluten-free diet, whether because they're celiac or have an autoimmune disorder. About 8% of the population is actually following a gluten-free diet, and another 10% on top of that is supporting gluten-free diets. So 3% is the vital need, 8% are living it, and that additional 10% are all the people who say, oh, I know someone.

When people ask me what I do and I say I own bakeries, and they ask which, and I say Origin Bakery, they say, oh my god, that's the gluten-free bakery, I go there. Thank you for existing, because my mom's celiac, or my aunt is celiac, or two of my workmates are celiac. That blows up the percentage of the population you're actually serving at any one time.

So when we look at places where a franchise would not only serve its community but thrive in it, we're looking at roughly 100,000 people or more, accessible within about a 30-minute span. In denser urban settings you need to look at bigger data, because people don't leave their neighbourhood so much. In more rural settings you can look at the hub communities people are constantly coming into. We look at who lives in those areas, and at the make-up of the population. Are you predominantly seniors? Your diet changes over the course of your life, and you often have a few more restrictions.

The interesting thing about gluten-free demographics is that you're serving anybody from 3 to 95. There's no consistent demographic, say, women aged 20 to 45. It doesn't seem to matter what your race, your ethnicity or your age is.

Caleb: There was a really interesting conversation I had with Jared, whose company is Crafty Ramen, in Ontario. He and his wife trained in Japan; he's Michelin-trained, under Gordon Ramsay, before they went to Japan, learned ramen and came back. Making a really good bowl of ramen is all about the broth and the layering, but they did it frozen. During COVID, which I think is when things really took off, and he's now in 6,800 stores across North America, which is wild. His aha moment was at a trade show, when they realized they'd forgotten to bring some pucks to melt. One of them said, why don't we check Instacart? Within 15 minutes they had what they needed. They realized that by aligning with another system, their product had become so much more accessible.

The last question I love asking people is what they need most to grow right now. I don't know if this would be on the franchise side, or data, or getting the franchise model going. I'm maybe putting words in your mouth. If you had to put your finger on one thing, what would you say you need most?

Tara: I need people in their communities recognizing what they could bring to their community. Since we opened our doors back in 2010, we've been asked, oh, this is awesome, when are you going to serve us in Kelowna or Calgary or Saskatoon or Winnipeg? And I was like, well, we're two weeks open, so not anytime soon.

I have an MBA; I got it during the pandemic. I've worked in management and business for a very long time, so I have a unique skill set and perspective on what it takes to grow something, especially something that didn't exist. And I'm surprised that I'm still faced with the exact same problem we had at the very beginning of this concept. When we were looking for funding to start the bakery, people said to us, if it's such a good idea, why doesn't it exist yet?

Because nobody was doing it. There were one or two bakeries over in Vancouver doing a very small amount of production, mom-and-pop style, but there wasn't anything like what we've set up. I've traveled globally, all through the States and Canada, and nobody does what we do. They do fractions of it, within certain product tiers, but not the whole host, and not to the same quality of ingredients. I'll admit that part of this is because I'm a bit insane, because I am not celiac and I'm not gluten-free. So everything we make has to hit that level of texture and taste. I have to want it, eat it, and enjoy it, not just make it so somebody has an option.

So we proved it. We proved it's a good idea, and it does now exist. We've existed and thrived, and we made it through COVID, which says a lot about what a need is, and how a community can support a product and a company that shows up for it. And with the franchise model, I've been met with the exact same question. If it's such a great idea, why doesn't it exist? Why hasn't a larger company monopolized such a blue ocean space? There's no other company that is dedicated to being gluten-free and lets people expand at scale, growing with the knowledge the parent company has learned over 17 years. That does my head in a little bit. I'm so surprised I'm still being asked the same question, even though we've proven the concept and we've proven the model. We haven't proven the franchise yet, so we're kind of back to square one, where you need people willing to stand up and say, actually, I know that my community needs this, and I'd like to run a business. What we'll do is get in behind you, train you in absolutely everything, and make sure your community learns to support you. But you do need people to say it's worth it, it's worth doing something that somebody hasn't done yet.

Caleb: I'm reminded of the guy in Kelowna who ran for council, Brad or something. Did you see that? His signs and his whole approach were just so honest. He's like, I don't even really want to do this. And he won. I've seen a few of his videos pop up, walking with his mom, talking about his approach to politics as just looking at what's going on with everybody. And I thought, if you're a campaign advisor, you'd be like, come on, Brad. But if it's this simple to just be honest with people, why isn't more of it the case? I hate to sound abstract, but maybe part of what we're experiencing is waiting for people to say, hey, if you actually loved your neighbours like you love yourself, your minds would be blown at how the world changes. Maybe it's that simple in some ways.

Tara: I find it interesting that it comes down to our risk tolerance. Courage is a hard thing to come by and actually make decisions with. We can be willing to go to a new community, but are you willing to talk to somebody in that community?

I'm endlessly curious. I love science, which is probably why I love baking and why I ended up in this gluten-free world. I'm never bored, and that's exciting. I like learning about our customers, I love working with our staff and learning about them, I love creating new products, and I love business mentoring. That's part of why this franchise idea isn't just an idea for me, it's let's do it. I get to mentor new business owners. I get to help you support a new community, and learn about a place I don't know in the process. We get to collaborate at every single juncture. That's really exciting to me.

One of the best experiences I can link to what you're saying: years ago I did a house swap with a couple in northern England, up in the Lake District, and England is still very small in how people move around. In Canada we're huge, we have tons of space, and driving a couple of hours to visit family or friends isn't out of the norm. We were staying in a little village just outside Penrith, and we decided to go to the pub in the next village over, literally a 10-minute drive. When we walked in, with obviously Canadian accents, they asked where we were visiting from and where we were staying. We told them, and they gave us the most puzzled look: oh, you came all the way over here? It was a 10-minute drive. Are you kidding me? And they said, oh no, we never go that way.

People who have lived in one place for 40 years were genuinely surprised that somebody would drive 10 minutes to go to their pub, because it really is their pub. Nobody else goes there. That pub is alive and well because their community shows up for it all the time, and yet they're surprised when somebody ventures to it.

So I find it interesting how much somebody's curiosity limits how they move forward. As humans who want to create more connections and support more people, we need to be willing to take the risk. If we're going to travel, let's talk to the people we travel among, not just go into an experience, be quiet, look around and leave. This whole endeavour takes a little bit of courage, to notice that this is different. But it's proven to succeed. You just need to take the risk and say, I'm willing to do something different in my community, and show up.

Caleb: Very cool. Well, Tara, thank you. Thank you also for having the staff keep the coffee grinder quiet, although I love the hum of it, and the flour bags in the background. It's beautiful to see. Great job.

Tara: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me along.