Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chris MacLeod. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Chris, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

I grew up in northern California where local and fresh food have always been a relatively common staple in my life. When I first started working at a bakery, which was also the beginning of my personal baking experience as well, I realized that I didn’t know what wheat was beyond a sack of flour. I didn’t put much thought into it – the quality of the flour, the freshness, or where it came from. It was just an ingredient, scooped out of a brown sack and into the mixing bowl. This was the first big food disconnect I realized for myself, and that most likely, a disconnect for most people, too.

Eventually, after working in Portland, OR, Pt. Reyes Station, CA, and living in Germany, I was drawn to start my own bakery with local ingredients, and ended up in Minneapolis, the Mill City, thinking there would be a strong regional grain economy in 2015. When I arrived in the land of wheat, corn & soy, I was greatly mistaken. I learned that most of the grain grown in the state is sold internationally or to commodity markets. That much is grown here, sent away to be processed, only to return as flour or other products. The local bakeries in town, some that I worked at to get acquainted with the baking industry here, were also sourcing commodity grain, with a generalized desire for local wheat.

I dug through the internet to find the farmers in Minnesota and neighboring states that grew organic grains, and also importantly, milled them. I found Mark Askegaard in Moorhead, who grows organic wheat, golden flax, and soybeans, who was able to mill the wheat for me & send, in terms of grain, a minuscule shipment to me.

This was the start of our backbone – fresh & local ingredients. We source all of our organic flour from Minnesota (ok, 95-99%, 1-5% comes from Wisconsin and North Dakota), and it is milled within two weeks of baking. Fortunately since 2015 the local grain economy has grown, with a new mill & more farmers excited about keeping their product locally, with people they can connect with. We started creating close connections with farmers at the farmers markets, and also realized that these are the people we want our money to go to, and to truly highlight what is grown here, in our brief summer season.

I started to think a lot about the idea of “what does it mean to be a local business”, and that it is more than employing a staff or simply the place we are in – it is building a community through food & integrity. We source about 75% of our ingredients from the upper midwest and around 50% of our budget goes directly to farmers and producers. These are people we know, and we know the true quality of their ingredients, or how they are grown. We are working to reconnect the countryside to the city, and to shift the expectations of customers, especially within baking, where most often, every ingredient is anonymous.

Chris, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

LAUNE – ‘lao-nuh’ – a german word, meaning mood, whim, or vibe. When I was living in Munich and invited to a party, people would tell me to ‘bring nur deine gute Laune’, just bring your good vibe. Baking revolves around vibes. The quality of our products can often depend on our mood – if we are present, or rushed, happy, feeling chaotic. And the results show it. And also, the act of baking for people, of creating a community, also supports our ‘gute Laune.’ To be part of a daily life is incredibly special. We have families who have been eating our bread more or less since 2015, children who have grown up on Laune Bread.

I grew up in the Bay Area, studied Rhetoric and German in college, lived in Portland OR, Munich & Köln, Germany, as well as Bern, Switzerland.

I studied abroad in Munich during college, and fell in love with the bread culture there – the common corner bakeries, the assortment of regional breads, and bread as a staple for every meal. I befriended someone who’s parents own and operate a bakery in the small town of Wernberg, and saw a family that was proud of their profession, and continued to be excited by it. Back home, my parents got home from work, often in a foul mood.

This stuck with me through college and when I graduated, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, I recalled this experience and ended up working at a german bakery in Portland, OR. I have been baking since, now for about ten years, professionally. My understanding and knowledge of bread & pastry is from working under bakers, and an obsession for learning more about the craft, baking at home, devouring books and forums online. I have traveled extensively visiting bakeries in the US and in Europe, and many of our breads & pastries are adaptations or inspired by these travels, as well as my baking jobs here in the US and in Switzerland.

Laune Bread is a local Minneapolis bakery, sourcing local ingredients, building connection with farmers & the community in Minneapolis and the farmers beyond the city. We strive to reduce waste – although we don’t necessarily understand how much work, energy, time farmers put into growing our ingredients, we see some of it. We want to respect and honor their energy, and that of the land, and so we work to reduce and limit waste in the bakery. We use a subscription program which helps us bake to bread to order, and we often bake below demand for our storefront, selling out rather than having an abundance of breads and pastries at the end of the day. We turn unsold croissants into crumbs for fillings, mash old bread with boiling water to mix into new batches, and use old coffee in fillings and glazes.

We work to adapt recipes to incorporate regional ingredients, so instead of using almonds for frangipane, we make our own version with golden flax, which we refer to as ‘flaxipane’. All of our breads and pastries are made with Minnesota grains, and all our products are 60% or more whole grain flour, as sifted flour is inherently more wasteful and consumes more energy to sift. We also incorporate other grains into our products, to fully support a regenerative grain farm – so we mix in barley, rye, millet, oat, buckwheat flours into a variety of our breads and pastries.

Our breads are influenced by german breads, and are baked in a style more reminiscent of the west coast. So, they are whole grain forward, sourdough breads, with a lot of water in them to create a bread that has a custardy texture and is moist, which is atypical for whole grain forward breads.

Sourdough, whole grain, and a diversity of grains makes breads and pastries that are healthier for you. Our bread is easier to digest, has a longer shelf life, and supports gut health.

Even our croissants are 50% whole grain flour! We have received a lot of positive feedback from consumers realizing that a croissant can have more flavour than simply butter – that they can taste the wheat, and how it adds a depth to the product.

I am incredibly proud to walk into our bakery and to see all the ingredients that are sourced from Minnesota and the upper Midwest, and to know all the farmers and producers that work to create these products. I am proud of how we show up as a local food business, and the connections we are creating with farmers and the folks in our neighborhood who show up and learn about the grains,

We are working to create a more sustainable business, both in the ways we run our daily operation, and who we source from. We are only open three days a week because there is so much energy put into selling bread and pastries for three days, and we want to continue doing this for years and years without being burnt out, and to offer our staff a consistent and fair schedule.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

This was, in a way, an unintentional marketing ploy –

We rented baking space for a few years before our brick and mortar opened in January of 2022. When we finally moved into our new space and were testing our products, we needed to find a home for all the breads and pastries we were baking. Because, to test our products, we were also testing our new ovens and mixers. So test baking two loaves in a mixer designed for 100 loaves, and an oven designed for 100 loaves, doesn’t really work. So our test bakes were resulting in a hundred loaves that we didn’t want to simply throw away. So we put our bread on a table on the side walk and posted on Instagram that we had free test loaves. We did this for three weeks, and every time, the bread was gone within two hours. This was a great way for people to learn about our soon to be open bakery, to taste our products, and build excitement for our business, all through eliminating unnecessary waste.

Another story:
In keeping with sourcing locally, and being in Minnesota where people love their rhubarb, the first plant to truly fruit in the late spring, we offered a trade: 1lb of clean rhubarb for $3 of store credit. It got the community so excited, people loved the idea of being able to trade bread and pastries for rhubarb from their garden, and to have their rhubarb contribute to our baked goods. We traded for more than 220lbs of rhubarb, which we turned into various rhubarb jams and compotes, and for a few months offered a Rhubarb & Cardamom Cream Cheese Danish.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Tiff and I both worked together for about eight months at a bakery in Minneapolis. Most of the people there showed up to work and did their job, and that was it. But Tiff and I slowly connected, learned that we both have lost parents, and ended up staying in touch after we parted ways. We would get a coffee or beer every few months and talk about our new jobs, what we were learning, and everything that was wrong about what we were doing. At this time, I had already started my business, but it didn’t click yet that Tiff should be there to. Eventually I closed Laune Bread to move to Switzerland, and on the day I left Minneapolis, I asked if she would restart my business with me when I returned. We had the same ideas of what we wanted, both saw the same faults in the food industry, and also could laugh easily together.

When I was living in Switzerland, we would often chat, trying to resolve issues in our croissants or other baked goods. Soon, these chats became a support net for me, as I was struggling mentally, and Tiff was there to ask the hard questions and listen. Even though I knew I wanted her to join me on this adventure, the support she gave me truly amplified our friendship and trust.

Tiff is my business partner, but she is also one of my closest friends, a confidant, and I get to enjoy participating in the life she leads with her husband and young daughter.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.launebread.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/launebread/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/launebread