We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alina Kolman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alina, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Our mission is to offer our customers truly artisanal baked goods made with premium ingredients, that is why we make every element of our products in house, from the naturally leavened breads to custom cakes and various pastries, every single item that comes out of our bakery is unique. Another aspect that differentiate us from other bakeries is that we change our menu every week, alternating our products based on seasonality and demand and also introducing new items in the weekly menu so that our customers always have something to look forward to trying. Since our products do not come out of a production line and they take time to make, the waiting for the weekly menu becomes part of the experience and the desserts and pastries are received by our customers as a special treat.

Alina, 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 was born and raised on a small farm in the heart of Transylvania (Romania) where food was entirely home-made, natural, seasonal and organic. My mother would bake fresh sourdough bread once a week in the big outdoor brick oven and pies and pastries on special occasions and Holidays. Those flavors are part of my identity so when I found myself 6,000 miles away from home, on a different continent, making bread and sharing my family’s recipes helped me adjust to this new environment and connect with people.
My passion for baking and cooking led me to study nutrition because it was important for me to understand the nutritional value of what we are eating and the way our bodies process various foods. In 2018, my husband Fred encouraged me to take this passion to a professional level so we opened Fred’s International Bakery and started attending farmers markets in Las Vegas. That was how we built a customer base, we met fantastic people whom we introduced to our products and who became also our friends not just customers. When the Covid 19 Pandemic hit and the farmers markets were closed, our customers started picking up their weekly bread and pies at our commercial kitchen once a week. The demand for bread and also pies, cakes and pastries was growing so in the summer of 2022 we stopped attending farmers market in order to accommodate all the custom orders we were receiving. In addition to those custom orders we hold pop-up events every weekend at our commercial kitchen when we offer freshly baked goods, which our customers can ore-order on our website from the weekly menu. Our mission is to bring to our customers’ table high quality, hand-crafted baked goods and rediscover authentic recipes and techniques that bring out the true flavors of food.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my business partner, who is also my husband in Bucharest, Romania, where I was working as a Court appointed translator for English and he was involved in business projects overseas. He is also Romanian, having left the country at a very young age to live abroad with his family, so his childhood memories are filled with the unique and unforgettable flavors of the Romanian cuisine. He has supported my passion for baking and cooking from day one and he encouraged me to take the first steps into the extraordinary and delicious universe of bread, cakes and pastries.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In the first few years of our business we were selling our baked goods at the farmers markets across town, it was hard work but meeting new people and having return customers was extremely satisfying and a source of energy and motivation to keep doing what we were doing. In the spring of 2020 when farmers markets closed down because of the Covid 19 pandemic we were at risk of closing our business because there was no place for us to sell our products. We went through great lengths to keep our business afloat, offering delivery to our customers even on very small orders, which was very expensive for us and time-consuming but it was an effort we had to make in order to keep our customers and survive in those challenging times

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fredsintlbakery.com
• Instagram: freds_internationalbakery
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FredsInternationalBakery
• Other: Google Business
  https://g.co/kgs/PRjRLVy