We recently connected with Abby Peterson and have shared our conversation below.

Abby, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

I was a zookeeper taking care of small New World primates before I decided to bake full time. Zookeeping kind of becomes a very niche skill where you end up feeling like you don’t know what you would do without zookeeping… but it’s also a job that just requires a lot of determination, manual labor, and passion.  I think those skills made it easier for me to pivot to running my own little bakery. I knew I could do hard things, it was just taking the leap.

Abby, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I bake bread and other goods for people in my community!  My desire to make real, flavorful bread and baked goods available to everyone motivated me to pivot from my career as a zookeeper into a micro-bakery owner, thus Big Raven Bread was born.

I strive with Big Raven Bread to stick to what is important to me- the community, being sustainable, and making good, real food accessible to more people.  I ride my bike all over the neighborhoods surrounding me, making sure good bread gets to everyone.  Through bike delivery, sourcing ingredients locally when possible, and donating a portion of profits to local organizations and foundations, I hope my baking makes the community better for everyone.  I have a sliding-scale payment system, which allows people to pay a price that fits them and allows others in the community to support me getting bread to those who need it.

I worked as a zookeeper for many years after studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology in college. Working with animals is one of the most magical gifts in the world, but also very hard and requires an immense amount of sacrifice, so I knew I couldn’t do it forever. I baked for fun on the side, and then started pushing to learn new skills by staging at different bakeries while traveling and working part time at bakeries. When people first started to say that I should sell what I was making I thought they were crazy… but now here we are!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I started baking bread for fun (inspired by a history of baking in my family) while I was working as a zookeeper. Taking care of small monkeys by day, then making dough and baking at night and early mornings. I did not intend to become a full-time baker, but viewed it as a pipe dream. But after sharing my breads with coworkers, more people started asking for it and telling me to sell it. During the pandemic I was having a lot of compassion fatigue while zookeeping, I needed to do something else for a while. After many tears, I made the decision to leave zookeeping and I figured I would bake a bit while I figured out my next career. I made a few posts on instagram and on neighborhood pages about my bread and through word of mouth it just spread. Now here I am doing it full time.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I don’t want to just sell bread and baked goods, but I want to be a bigger part of the community. So I take time to talk with my customers and get to know them (and sometimes their pets too!). I deliver on my bike throughout the neighborhood, which has taught me so much about the community I live in, and has given me time to appreciate and make connections with the people in it! I think of my customers as friends and I think that keeps them connected and wanting to support me and my business.

Contact Info:

• Website: bigravenbread.com
• Instagram: @bigravenbread
• Facebook: @bigravenbread
• Yelp: Big Raven Bread
• Other: [email protected]