Genevieve & Jud Smith | Brimfield Bread Over
Genevieve and Jud Smith opened Brimfield Bread Oven in January of 2016, and by all accounts business has been full steam ahead ever since.
If the current pandemic is any prediction of future business, they’ll be doing just fine when society comes out the other side. According to Genevieve, there were some challenges they had to face – as expected for any business running a food service operation cut off from much physical contact with the general public. “We’re learning something new every day,” she said of the new online ordering system they didn’t have in place before COVID-19. “It was hard getting customers to transfer over. There’s a lot of teaching involved. People don’t know how to use web stores,” she said.
Like many traditional restaurants, where dining rooms have been transformed into staging areas for packaging food for fulfillment of online or telephone orders, the Smith’s seating area is limited to a menu that reflects quick service. What’s more, they have had to supplement paper goods to accommodate the surge in orders, unlike traditional fine dining experiences where to-go boxes are virtually unheard of – save for the occasional doggy bag. Genevieve said, “we actually had to order more paper products!”
As for the nuts and bolts of running a bakery, normal bakery hours definitely still apply. However, whereas in non-pandemic times when they can run several bakes throughout the course of a day, virtually everything needs to be out of the oven at or near opening to accommodate reduced hours for pick-up. There’s still no shortage on the quantity of baked offerings, as well as raw goods such as yeast, and flour – the latter of which one customer had loaded in bulk into his vehicle.
“We hadn’t realized how people normally come through, but seeing it all laid out changes our perspective and creates a very positive feeling. We feel very supported by our community. People are going out of their way to be kind. It’s going as well as it can so far,” said Genevieve.
