Sam Parr talks with Zach Crockett about the bread shortage that hit during COVID lockdowns. Flour and yeast vanished from shelves, Cuisinart bread machines became bestsellers, and San Francisco's Mr. Holmes Bakehouse sold out of $25 sourdough starter kits. Zach tracked it all using Amazon data and Google Trends, and started feeding his own starter named Pierpont.
Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Behind the Hustle. I'm back with Zach Crockett, our Sunday editor. Zach, good to see you.
Hey man, good to be back for another episode of Hustlers in Their Closets during quarantine.
Is that where you are? You're literally stuck in your closet?
It's the only quiet place I can find, so It's cool. That's all we can do in these times.
I had this image of you. I always thought you lived out in the woods, like, so you go for these runs on these trails around your house, and I just had this picture of you secluded off somewhere quiet, but it's not that, I guess, huh?
Yeah, it's, uh, every place has its, uh, ups and downs right now, so.
All right, well, at least you found somewhere quiet. I doubt my place is going to be quiet, so forgive any interruptions that happen here. This week you're doing a piece that's near and dear to my heart. I love to bake bread. I've done it for many years. My kids eat like a loaf of bread a day. My wife thankfully has taken up the habit of making a loaf of bread every day for us. She won't make more than one because it's like that one is just enough. But it's almost impossible to find flour now. People are crazy mad and excited to do this, and it's almost like we've returned to this agrarian culture. What's your story gonna be about? What are you sort of, how are you approaching this?
Yeah, this week we're doing a story on the meteoric rise of at-home bread baking. So as you said, it's pretty much impossible to find flour, yeast, bread starter, even bread machines, Bread pans. The entire bread economy has been shaken to its core by this influx of quarantined people looking for a new hobby. So we're diving into some of the numbers behind that using tools like Jungle Scout to look at increases in Amazon searches and sales volume of things like yeast. You know, just utilizing basic tools like Google Trends. We talked to Red Star Yeast and King Arthur Flour, which are some of the oldest brands in the country, which are both facing immense shortages right now and supply chain issues. And we also ran a survey and heard from almost 1,000 Hustle readers. War stories in the kitchen, a lot of gummy sourdough loaves and, Also a lot of bread experts who have a lot of experience baking.
Very cool. So one of the things you found was about the sort of reemergence of some of these bread-making machines that had not been selling very well, and what did you— what was interesting about that?
So the bread-making machine was this thing that was rolled out in 1983, 1984 It was marketed to be the next toaster, and for a while it did really well. About 3 or 4 or 5 million American households bought this bread-making machine, and then it kind of just died out. It disappeared, and it hasn't really sold well in the last few decades. Right now during coronavirus, Cuisinart bread makers are just exploding in sales. If you go on Amazon, it's like one of the top-selling products in the bread category. And so, you know, one thing we've been looking into is how this pandemic has affected industries you might not normally think about. I think at this point, it's pretty obvious to everyone that there's this huge explosion in bread interest. The things you don't really think about are like these, you know, the resurgence of these old weird machines like bread machines. It's been kind of interesting to watch that happen.
So you also talked to this little bakery called Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, and interestingly, when I was out in San Francisco, I'm based in the DC area, but I flew out to San Francisco probably 15 times last year and worked out of the office there where our headquarters is. And every time I leave San Francisco, I walk across the financial district down to the Ferry Building and I buy like a bunch of loaves of sourdough for my kids because they're crazy about it. I didn't even know about Mr. Holmes, but Mr. Holmes has had an interesting pivot in this time with obviously not being able to have a storefront.
Yeah, their owner has gotten really creative. Bakeries all over the place are closed, and his solution— he has— he had no e-commerce experience, really is an entrepreneur at heart, a true hustler kind of guy. He decided to start selling bread starter kits online, so he leveraged his expertise in baking took his team, which is full of skilled bakers and all kinds of culinary artisans, and basically used his warehouse, transformed his warehouse into kind of an ad hoc e-commerce operation where he's shipping out hundreds of these bread starter kits. You can buy them for like $25. They come with everything you need. And the average, you know, bread novice like me can cook a loaf in a few days, bake a loaf in a few days. So it's really kind of a genius idea. And we're starting to see this adopted by a number of other small bakeries around the country. A number of people in our survey said they were doing similar things. Bakeries are selling loaves through Instagram, and they're finding all kinds of creative ways to keep themselves afloat during this, during these shutdowns here.
So do they sell a sourdough starter, or is it just a starter kit?
So the one I bought is just like a white bread starter. There is a way to convert it into a sourdough starter kit, I think. But he's also rolling out, he has like a cookie baking kit that he's selling now. He's kind of expanding into some other areas. But it's like an immensely popular bakery. Their stuff is incredible. If you've ever been in San Francisco, and hopefully in the future, if you have a chance to try them out, they're really great. So they already have this like cult following, both at the retail location and on Instagram online. So they were able to kind of tap into that a bit.
Very cool. So you, as a novice baker, you said the word novice, have you actually tried to bake some bread this week yourself?
I'm a terrible baker, but we, I bought a kit from Mr. Holmes last week and it's on day 2 of feeding right now. So you have to feed it for a few days, you feed it flour and water, let it incubate. Right now he's sitting in the refrigerator and gonna try baking him tonight. His name's Pierpont. My girlfriend named him Pierpont, so—
Excellent.
We'll see how it turns out.
Well, that's good. I'm looking forward to reading your story, Zach, and I think it'll be a lot of fun to see sort of your take on the economics of the bread baking phenomenon that we're going through right now. So thanks for joining us again this week, Zach.
