March 2024: Hello from us, new bakers, and breakfast club in Nashville
Hi friends!
Welcome to the first Baking Notification Project newsletter. Brandon and I are both news people by trade, so it was inevitable that we would eventually start a newsletter for the BNP. But why now?
It's almost been three years since we dreamed up this passion project to help me share extra baked goods with my neighbors. We've grown slowly and intentionally over the years to allow other home and hobby (and some pro!) bakers to use the tech that we developed to share extras with their neighbors, too. All of our outreach has been by Instagram and word of mouth, but we know that not everyone uses social media or wants to be plugged into it all the time.
So, once a month, we'll send you this newsletter to say hi, share some updates about what we've been up to, and let you know where new bakers have joined us. Let's get to it!
What's in this issue
- Re-introducing ourselves
- New bakers in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee
- Nashville breakfast club
Looking back and looking forward
Hi! We're Jessica and Brandon, the tiny team behind the Baking Notification Project. We incubated the BNP in our Nashville kitchen in Fall 2021. Since then, we've supported more than 80 bakers with many hundreds of subscribers to share thousands of baked goods.
We continue to be a small, independent tech business with a strong community-focus, and our greatest success is the friendships formed when neighbors meet again and again on front porches to share gifts of baked goods.
Last year, we focused on automating as much of our tech product as possible so that we could turn our very limited attention to maintaining the BNP while we also welcomed a new baby to our family.
By mid-year, and with a months-old baby, our plans for modest growth were sidelined by a regulatory change affecting businesses that use SMS to communicate with customers. It was all four hands on deck to re-develop our workflows and business model in just a few short summer months. We lost nearly half of our bakers during the transition.
But we also celebrated one-year anniversaries with more than a dozen bakers, hosted our first collaborative pop-up at Nelson Community Market, showed up at bake sales, house parties, and other community events in Nashville, and just kept creating moments of joy as often as we could - with you - in a year where many of us struggled to find it.
In 2024, we'll look for more ways to get off the internet and into community spaces with you, we'll continue to hype and highlight home bakers in neighborhoods across the U.S., and we'll give you opportunities to support our work directly.
We're so proud of what we've built, and we're grateful to each one of you for being excited about the Baking Notification Project with us. 🧁
New (and returning!) bakers in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee
When you subscribe for notifications from a baker in your neighborhood, your money goes directly to your baker to help cover the cost of ingredients and supplies. Find a baker in your neighborhood, and check our newest baking friends:
Bradenton, Florida
Tomma Marcincuk (Meadow Lakes East) | Subscribe
Greensboro, North Carolina
Sometimes Susan Bakes (Lake Jeanette) | Subscribe
Nashville, Tennessee
Bright Fare (Bell Meade) | Subscribe
Brigid Baked (East Hill) | Subscribe
Brownstone Bakehouse (Germantown) | Subscribe
Dani Taylor (Donelson) | Subscribe
Sandra Amstutz (Sylvan Park) | Subscribe
Megan Garner (Bordeaux/White's Creek) | Subscribe
Rise and shine and meet us for coffee and pastries in Nashville
Last fall, BNP baker Karri Suh and I met up early one morning before work for coffee. Then we did it again, but we invited friends. And then we did it again, and again, and again, and again.
This group of new and old and mutual friends includes bakers and people who love food and a whole host of other things that we discover as we get to know each other a little better each month. It's been a delight to get off the internet and sit together over coffee and pastries.
Want to join us in Nashville? We meet at 7 AM on the first Friday of each month, usually at Dozen Bakery in Wedgewood-Houston, but sometimes we move around. Reply to this email if you'd like me to send you the calendar invite.
That's it for this month. If someone you know would like the Baking Notification Project, please send this newsletter along to them.
All the best,
Jessica and Brandon @ The Baking Notification Project