Here For It
We had the honor of spending most of today with a journalist from Craft to Crumb, a multi-media publication focused on retail bakeries. And look, when you get to the stage where you read niche magazines about the baking industry, you’ll quickly grow weary of reading about production facilities and mass distribution when you are a retail storefront. Craft to Crumb focuses on the struggles and demands of customer facing brick-and-mortar storefronts, so WE ARE HERE FOR IT.
And this isn’t even a story so much about our day, but more about what we did leading up to today to make PJP look like her best self for Joanie’s visit. And sadly, that was really just a lot of scrubbing and mopping. We all headed to PJP yesterday and here’s how we broke it down: Jeanne scrubbed the grease trap, the pipes under the sink, and the dishwasher. Jason moved all the ovens and freezers out and scraped flour and dough off the floor. Elle swept it all up. I mopped it all. That sounds short and sweet, but it took several hours (and a lot of sweat). And journalist visit or not, it desperately needed to be done. Despite our daily sweeping and our weekly mopping, moving the appliances and scraping the dried dough off the floor is always a reality check about how hard we work and how many pounds of flour we go through in a regular week. (It was also a reality check of just how much Jeanne loves bleach. I hope when Craft to Crumb runs our feature, they reach out to Clorox to purchase ad space. Jeanne should literally be sponsored by Clorox. When our afternoon staff arrived today, they could smell the bleach from Jeanne washing the mop head in the laundry.)
Beyond cleaning, Ellery had the best idea to frame our Pie of the Month posters and hang them over the pie display. She and Jeanne went to MIchael’s on Friday and purchased all the frames and spent the next hour framing each poster from April, May, June, July, and August. They look absolutely lovely, so we’ve ordered a set for West to hang in the hallway there. Elle’s busy working on the September poster, so we will switch out April with September and keep it current (and September is going to be the cutest poster yet). The posters bring great color and so much fun to the wall space above the display. We tried to figure out how to photograph it for social media, but it’s hard to do without a ladder. I’ll drop a marginal photo below.
(Speaking of social media, if you haven’t seen Jeanne’s TikTok that is also on Facebook and Instagram Reels, it has over 47,000 views, so go watch…it’s super clever and fun. I can’t take any credit - that was all Elle and Jeanne.)
But, back to today. Joanie Spencer, the editor-in-chief of Craft to Crumb, arrived at PJP Nifong at 8 am this morning and stayed with us until 2 pm. She asked all sorts of things about what we do, how we do it, why we do it, and what it looks like day-to-day at PJP. She also asked a lot of thoughtful questions that made me stop and think about what we do. It was basically my favorite sort of day. I got to talk about PJP a lot, I love meeting new people, and I was inspired by what Joanie and her team are doing in their work. I’m so excited she got to meet our family and hear our perspective on small bakery life. And when I said I still hold my goal of Oprah’s Favorite Things close to my heart, Joanie fully understood and respected the motivation for Oprah’s approval. And you really can’t ask for more than that.
Plus, our floors and walls looked great. too. So there’s that too.
