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

Alright, Natali thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

Before the pandemic, our bakery was 90% business to business. We sold bread to hotels, caterers, retailers, and above all, restaurants.

That day in March 2020, that it was announced in Canada that we were going into Covid lockdown, we lost about 80% of our business. My phone was ringing over and over with restaurants cancelling their standing orders “indefinitely”. I was faced with the option to lay off all of my staff and close the doors temporarily, or find another source of revenue to keep our team working and financially stable.

I went home and got to brainstorming with my husband. We came up with a home delivery idea. We would set up an online store on our website, and offer the general public the option to order our products and have them delivered contactless. It was a crash course in e-commerce for me! I had never set up anything like it before.

This endeavor ended up sustaining us through the first 4-5 months of the pandemic, and was far more successful than we could have imagined.

Today, although our wholesale business has rebounded, we still offer home delivery and bakery pick up options on our website and don’t see any reason to discontinue them in the foreseeable future.

Natali, 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?

Founding chef and baker Natali Harea takes no short cuts when crafting her one-of-a-kind recipes for some of Ottawa’s finest restaurants. Always drawn to the art of baking, Natali has dedicated her career to producing well-crafted bread. She uses all Canadian flour and her signature starter: Stan.

Our bread has strong rooted beginnings in the traditional ways of bread-making. This way of making dough involves a 24 – 48 hour fermentation process to give the loaves a full bodied flavour.

Natali learnt how to bake bread from her paternal grandmother, whom she called Buni. Buni was born and raised in communist Romania, and moved to Canada with her son when he married Natali’s Canadian Mother. Buni brought her kitchen skills with her to Canada, and was always cooking and baking fresh bread for her family. Buni passed away in March 2020. Nat’s Bread Company is directly inspired by her teachings, and is an enduring love letter to her.

We are uniquely a wholesale bakery and are dedicating to providing a seamless service to our clients. This means commitment to on time deliveries, consistency of product, and creating new and unique items for our individual clients. We are the only Ottawa bakery with a commitment to creating and providing high quality, locally made, wholesale bread products.

We are also one of the few bakeries that still uses small mixers, hands on processes, and shaping techniques. We hand cut, scale, round, shape, and bake our loaves in small batches, ensuring our costumers get the most genuine product to their tables. Simple, Canadian ingredients are a staple in our products and we always avoid using additives or stabilizers. Simply put, we strive to make an honest loaf of bread.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

When I first had the idea of a wholesale bread bakery, I was working at Beckta Dining and Wine as a sous-chef. I brought the idea to my employer at the time, and he helped me make it a reality. My employer was working on opening his third restaurant, Gezellig. He suggested that we build a small bakery space in the basement of Gezellig, where I could run my business overnight and produce bread for his 3 restaurants while growing my client base. We discussed the necessary equipment that would be needed to start up, and he purchased it for me. The deal was that once my business had outgrown the overnight shared kitchen model, I’d purchase the equipment back from him and move out.

I moved out of the basement kitchen about 2.5 years after starting up, and did purchase back my equipment. I moved into another sublet situation, this time in a much larger kitchen at St Paul’s University. Here I was able to purchase more equipment – namely new ovens and a walk in fridge – while keeping my rent expenses at a minimum. We stayed at St Paul’s University for another couple of years, working strictly overnight.

The next stage of growth was to find our own stand alone bakery space. I decided it was time to do this while I was pregnant with my first child. I wanted a bakery which could run both day and night, since I didn’t want to be forced back into night shifts with a young child at home. For this stage, I met with the banks to source funding with my newborn son along for the ride!

We received a Canadian Small Business Loan to fund the build of our current wholesale bakery space at 857 Boyd Ave. This space required a large walk in fridge, new ovens, floors, and HVAC ventilation. We also received supplementary loans from The Business Development Bank of Canada which provided working capital while we closed down for the renovations.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I have been working in the food industry in Ottawa since I was 18 years old. For nearly 10 years I worked as a cook and chef in many of Ottawa’s great restaurants, all the while making connections along the way.

My reputation as a reliable and detail oriented cook/chef preceded me when I opened Nat’s Bread Company in 2013. Our city isn’t huge, and neither is the food industry in Ottawa. I was able to reach out to the many chefs I had met while working in Ottawa restaurants, and ask them to sign on as clients of Nat’s Bread Company. What keeps them with us as clients is our dedication to providing stellar service and communication. Everyone makes mistakes but we react and improve upon the mistakes we make, and never at the cost of our clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.natsbreadcompany.com
• Instagram: @natsbreadco
• Facebook: facebook.com/natsbreadcompany
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natali-harea-709847181/

Image Credits
Marianne Rothbauer