It’s late morning in the Grateful Bread warehouse, and Jeff Cleary—founder and head baker—supervises a team of five bakers intently focused on their final duties of the day. Hands never stopping, they scrape dough from a floured table, work, roll, and form the pieces into country dough loaves. And in just a couple hours, the baked dough will be served as table bread for some of Denver’s finest restaurants.
Housed in an 8,000 square-foot, unassuming industrial complex off Colfax in Golden, Colorado, the bakery is small—at least in comparison to the sheer volume that the crew produces. Roughly 70 hotels and restaurants are serviced daily. The team goes through about 15,000 pounds of flour each week, which amounts to roughly 2,500 pounds per day. That’s over 2,000 hamburger buns per day for the Park Burger family alone. And today’s daily production list is three pages long, with modifications filling an additional four pages.
While this output is impressive, the fact that each loaf is made by hand is staggering. But for Cleary, this attention to craft is only natural. He’s been doing it for a decade.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: 303 Magazine
