I plan on keeping these progress posts pretty short without getting too caught up in the details. What I hope to do is to capture what we are going through in the following three areas of bringing our concept to life. 

To get started, I'm just going to offer a brief summary of what we are working on and how we plan on breaking up the telling of our story:

We'll be starting out as a Cottage Food Business here in Colorado, working out of our home until we decide to scale things up, should that moment arrive. We want to share what we are going through from the business side of getting a bakery started, including product selection, factoring in local and regional grains, launching local sales through an online ordering system, and figuring out our method of distribution. I've been spending a chunk of time investigating equipment but will also serve in a supporting role when I am away from my day job as a programmer.

In a separate but parallel project, Ashley and I made our first investment in our community by purchasing a commercial property in downtown Lafayette, Colorado. We closed on the property in March and have started the process of designing and developing the property for use as a small-scale bakery with a retail storefront. This is where I will be spending a bulk of my time for the foreseeable future. I'll be doing some of the general contracting and construction, building upon some of the work I've done on other properties. This process actually started back in January, so I've got some posts to write to get you up to speed on what we've done so far.

Finally, since a large focus of our business model involves utilizing local and regional grains, produce, and other foodstuffs, we started Daily Grains as a website to aggregate data and information about nascent "grain chains" that are being revived across the country. Since I am a web and mobile developer by trade, this site made sense as a place to start our research regarding the who, what, when, where, and how of our local and regional food systems here in the Front Range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. We are in early talks with an organization that is already working on our regional grain chain and hope to contribute our digital skills to help accelerate our shared mission of expanding the grain chain. 

I'll be sharing the background on what we have here on this site, what we want to add, and where we see things going as part of the infrastructure we are building to support our bakery's (and the grain chain's) needs with regards to local and regional food systems.

So there you have it, a start to our storytelling. Our posts will mostly center on sharing updates on those three main areas as well as moving into promoting our sales efforts when the time comes. We hope you'll join us for the ride!