We were lucky to catch up with Cat Cox recently and have shared our conversation below.
Cat, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later
Sometimes I wish I would have started my business sooner. Baking is a very physical job. It requires a lot of energy and lifting. Production baking is not what most people imagine – decorating cutesy cupcakes. It is physically demanding. We are often working in a very hot environment, standing on our feet for 10 hours a day, slinging 50 lb bags of flour. I’ll be 42 soon, and sometimes I wonder about how long I can do this work. Ultimately, though I don’t think I knew enough when I was younger about the business to maybe pull it off at the caliber I can now.
I started Country Bird Bakery 2 years ago. I have worked in kitchens since 2010 when I took a job as a prep cook after a major life shift. I had been living in NYC working at a paper making studio working with artist to create handmade paper art. However, after the market crashed I decided I was ready to leave NYC and do something completely different. I moved to Marfa, TX. I thought I would start my own paper making studio, but the space I had lined up fell through. I took a bartending gig and then a job as a prep cook in one of the 2 nice restaurants in town. I had always baked as a hobby at home, and most of the work was baking, so I really enjoyed learning how to bake in a commercial setting. I quickly worked my way up and ended up as the Chef Du Cuisine and worked there for several years running that kitchen.
After getting a little burnt out on restaurant life (working nights), I decided to move back to my home town, Tulsa. I found a job as a garden educator (K-5). I did that for a couple of years. After swearing off restaurant work, I eventually ended up back in a kitchen, part time. Then later full time, because it didn’t feel like a real restaurant. Living Kitchen Farm and Dairy serves tasting menu dinners in a cabin in the woods Fri-Sun, 9 months out of the year. So, I always joke that I got tricked back into working in a restaurant. The owner wanted to do a bread course in the menu and I had a renewed obsession with sourdough. The 10 course menu changed entirely every other week. So I got to be creative and try new things often. I was putting grains in the smoker, fermenting porridges to add to the bread, etc. People loved the bread and wanted to buy it, but we weren’t set up for production. We simply didn’t have the equipment to do that. So, I decided when we closed for our off season (Jan-Mar) in 2019 I would teach sourdough classes. They sold out so quickly, I decided to add more, and those sold out.
So I continued teaching sourdough classes and started to wonder what working for myself would look like. I began to think I would like to be fully self employed by the time I was 40, so that gave me a few years to figure it out. People still inquired at the dinners about buying the bread, but I could only bake a couple loaves in the oven at a time and it really didn’t make sense without a bread oven. Thanksgiving 2019 I was dating a guy who asked me to make several sourdough loaves to take to his big family gathering. He ended up dumping me out of nowhere the night before Thanksgiving after I had already made the dough which was resting in the fridge. I was all set to bake 8 loaves the next morning, which would take be 4 hours. So, I decided to auction the bread off on Instagram. So, that was the first time I sold bread to the public. LOL. I ended up making extra bread because so many people wanted to buy it.
Then a few months later, Covid started. The farm restaurant did not re-open. Communal dining was central to the experience. However the owners were opening a new concept in downtown Tulsa, so I shifted to that restaurant and when things opened up I started teaching my classes again and then found a used bread oven for micro home bakeries. I launched my cottage bakery (home bakery) with a goal to sell sourdough monthly from my home while I maintained my full time restaurant job. Then a devastating fire at the restaurant next door shut us down mid February. I went to NYC for a month to work with my old paper making friends in their studio to get some distance from my life and think about my next move. A baker in a nearby town sent me a picture of a huge bread oven for sale and asked me if I wanted to buy it. I had sold my house out by the farm and had a little capital to buy the used oven. I would not have been able to afford a new oven. Then I came across a small space in a neighborhood I liked that was for lease. Everything started to seem to line up. I opened October 22, 3 months before I turned 40.
Even after so much experience in the industry it was still terrifying. The question “what if it doesn’t work out” was ever present in my mind, but the I knew I would regret it if I didn’t try. I would rather try and fail, then spend my life wondering if I could have done it. Doing this a little later in life, with more experience and a little savings meant that I could do it without an investor. I did have to borrow a little money, but I have been able to start small and grow organically, without the expectation of others.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Country Bird Bakery is an artisanal sourdough bakery in Tulsa, OK. We source local stone milled flour, as well as local dairy, eggs and produce for our baked goods. We try to coax flavor out of the stone milled grains in combination with the sourdough process. We make sourdough breads and sourdough croissants/laminated pastries. Education is central to what we do. We teach sourdough and baking workshops. It is such an amazing way to connect with people and build community. I love receiving messages from people who have taken the class and years later are still making bread every week for their family. Sourdough is a 3 day fermentation process that makes bread that is easier to digest and more nutritious. Because this process is so labor intensive and takes so many days we are only open Saturdays, and every other Thursday. Thursdays came about last summer as a way to accommodate our customers who spent their weekends at the lake and aren’t able to make it Saturday morning. We are a small team (4 full time and 2 part time) We start prepping on Tuesdays and spend all week getting ready for Saturday.
I am most proud of the quality and creativity of our products. Being open a limited amount of time helps with quality control and makes our product feel more special. We source the best local ingredients and have a lot of fun trying to come up with new flavor combinations. I created a bakery I wanted to exist in Tulsa. I have traveled and lived in other big cities and always try to visit the local bakeries. I wanted to create a place that could exist in San Fransisco or NYC. I want Tulsans to have that experience. I have very high standards and expectations.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
I worked as a sous chef and baker in a restaurant and started teaching sourdough classes as a side hustle, then selling bread from my house, and eventually opening my own brick and mortar retail bakery. Being able to maintain my full time job, while I built my business was really pivotal, especially since It was in the same industry. I had 12 years of experience in the restaurant industry before I fully launched my brick and mortar, and 4 of those years I had my side hustle going. The first couple of years, just teaching, then adding on selling bread from my house once I bought the small home bread oven (cost approximately) $3,000. That definitely felt like a milestone. Purchasing a bread dough fridge felt like a milestone too. Having more refrigeration allowed me to scale up significantly. It was in my garage because it was a commercial fridge and it wouldn’t fit in my house. That was problematic in the summer because my garage has no a/c and it was hard on the fridge. It was so stressful, especially if bake day happened to be storming. Running out to the garage to get bread to haul inside to bake during a severe thunderstorm is not something I would recommend.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
I think I built my reputation on my experience in the restaurant industry. I worked for the people/restaurants I admired, that had an impressive reputation. I put in the work, the hours, the years being part of teams that were working on a common goal: hospitality and pushing the boundaries. Anything I do, I want to be able to do it to the best of my abilities. I really care about what I am making, and what I am involved in. I think our guests can see, feel, and taste the passion that we have for what we do. Their excitement fuels our creativity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.countrybirdbakery.com
- Instagram: CountryBirdBakery
- Facebook: CountryBirdBakery
Image Credits
Molly Thrasher and Valerie Wei-Hass