Profitable Strategies To Scale a Baking Business With Phebe Rossi

Phebe Rossi is the Founder and CEO of Nuflours, Seattle’s premier gluten-free bakery serving various baked goods, including cakes, donuts, tiramisu, and quiche. Through Phebe’s strategic vision, Nuflours grew from a single brick-and-mortar location to a West Coast baking brand with an online presence and wholesale division. Phebe and Nuflours are dedicated to supporting women and minorities professionally and in leadership, with 90% of Nuflours’ workforce comprising women, LGBTQ individuals, or people of color.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Phebe Rossi shares her entrepreneurial journey and inspiration for starting a gluten-free bakery
Phebe’s experience transitioning into the retail space
Work-life balance as an entrepreneur
Tips for managing busy seasons
What is a co-manufacturer (co-man), and how can you locate a reliable supplier?
Options for funding a startup

In this episode…

When starting a business, expenditures are inevitable and may dampen a new business owner’s enthusiasm. How can baking entrepreneurs save on overhead in the beginning?

One option to reduce startup costs is to secure space at a farmers market. These local stands allow bakers to test the market, raise brand awareness, build a community, and grow a customer base. Bakery owner Phebe Rossi also explains that bakers can share kitchen space with other vendors. Once scaling becomes a priority and you’re ready to transition into retail locations, you should consider outsourcing a co-packer or co-manufacturer. Both alleviate the stress associated with production. Additionally, co-mans and co-packers are cost-effective, lessen the need for additional labor, and have higher-quality tools to generate superior products.

In this episode of the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, Odette D’Aniello welcomes Phebe Rossi, Founder and CEO of Nuflours, for an informative conversation about starting a baking business. Phebe shares her inspiration for opening a gluten-free bakery, how to source co-manufacturers and co-packers, and funding options to help with startup costs.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

Today’s episode is brought to you by Celebrity Cake Studio, a family-owned and operated cake boutique.

Celebrity Cake Studio has been baking joy into all of their artistically designed cakes and desserts for 21 years.

They are proud to work with a vibrant team of cake designers and bakers that help you celebrate the sweet moments in your lives.

They have received numerous awards, winning Best of Western Washington for many years in a row and various small business accolades.

To learn more about how you can celebrate yourselves or the ones you love, visit www.celebritycakestudio.com or email them at info@celebritycakestudio.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast where we feature top bakery and specialty food entrepreneurs from around the world and share stories and tips on how to create a successful life in the baking world.

Odette D’Aniello 0:16

Hi, I’m Odette D’Aniello, the host of the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, where I interview bakery owners, especially women, to hear how they live their fun, creative lives while running their businesses. I want to encourage you to go back and check out our past episodes. The Katie Poppe, Co-founder of Blue Star Donuts in Portland, Olga Sagan of Seattle’s beloved Piroshky Piroshky, and Patti Stobaugh of PattiCakes in Arkansas. I have here, Phebe Rossi of Nuflours, Seattle’s premier gluten-free bakery. The bakery opened in 2011. Phebe is a solopreneur who started in the farmers market. Then she opened a retail store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in 2014. And now Nuflours has a thriving retail location, an online presence there’s chips throughout the country, and a wholesale division that sells gluten-free cakes and desserts, and delicious blueberry rice in the Pacific Northwest include Washington, Oregon and Idaho. We met through the UW Ascend Program. More on that later. Today’s episode is brought to you by Celebrity Cake Studio, a family-owned and operated cake boutique. Celebrity Cake Studio has been baking joy into all of their artistically designed cakes and desserts for 25 years. We are proud to work with a vibrant team of cake designers and bakers that help you celebrate the sweet moments of your lives. To learn more about how you can celebrate yourself or the ones you love, visit http://www.celebritycakestudio.com or email us at info@celebritycakestudio.com. Before introducing Phebe and start our conversation, I wanted to give a big shout out to you UW’s Ascend Program where we met, Phebe, way back in 2017. We are part of a cohort of food business owners that studied with professors and experts that were brought in by the program. And we learned a lot about running a food business, didn’t we?

Phebe Rossi 2:33

It was a really great program.

Odette D’Aniello 2:36

I agree, as well. I’m so glad we’ve stayed connected because that’s what’s going on seven years already. Uh huh. Oh, yeah, we’re just a possee of bakery owners here. And a lot of that we met through the Ascend program. So I wanted to just have you tell our listeners, Phebe, about how you started. I know you have a breadth of experience and running multi channel, this bakery businesses. So tell us more about you and what your story is.

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