Finding Community at Francis Bread
Images by Brette Little
When Meghan Carr and Peter Hunt of Francis Bread arrived on the Salt Spring scene in 2018, they quickly gained a name for themselves - and their bread.
With plenty of career experience in food and hospitality behind them, Meghan as a sommelier and Peter as a cook and bartender, they instantly saw the potential taking over the Duthie Gallery space, the idea planted by Peter’s parents who were ready to retire from the cycle of gallery shows and events. Those years of working in Vancouver restaurants introduced them to the Salt Spring Island “brand” of food, incredible produce grown by a dedicated community of farmers. “This is such a special food place,” muses Peter, who noted that they saw room for themselves within that. They had a suspicion that Salt Spring was home to the kind of community that would support their bakery dreams, even though at that early stage they didn’t have a clear picture of what exactly that was going to look like.
“The whole process was so grounding and slowed life down.”
-Peter Hunt
While it was the taste of a good sourdough that initially had Peter on his path to become a breadmaker, what really got him hooked was the ritual of making. “The whole process was so grounding and slowed life down,” says Peter, “and humbling, kind of unpretentious.” Mostly self-taught, Peter did experience what life was like in a heavy-production bakery in Melbourne, Australia, where he and Meghan lived for 6 months before moving to Salt Spring to launch Francis Bread.
They had seen a huge potential to turn the Duthie Gallery space into something new, and while Peter went to high school here and was well familiar with Island life, Meghan was wide-eyed with adulation: “Since the moment I came here, I was like, ‘this place is amazing!’” And from there the wheels started turning on how they could make the move.
In the beginning, they knew one thing: they wanted a woodfired oven. Beyond that, they knew there was a market here where they might sell their bread - and that was about all their business plan included. It just started out with a simple intention to make bread. There were no early plans for a cafe, Meghan had another job and thought she might just help Peter “on the side.” Within two weeks of launching Francis Bread, it became clear that Meghan would have to quit her other job and come full-time to work alongside Peter.
Meghan and Peter forged early bonds with local farmers during their Saturday Market days, swapping loaves of bread for produce and quickly gaining an appreciation for the delicious things that grow here. Now, they have ongoing relationships not just with farmers and florists, but other food producers like Salt Spring Kitchen Co., Mavericks Treats, and Moonshine Mamas.
Today, we know Francis Bread as a lively community hub where you will run into friends and neighbours, children and dogs play happily on the lawn, and there’s a delicious suite of treats and breads to choose from that feature ingredients from local farms and food producers. For those who didn’t witness the growth of the bakery over the past two years, it might be easy to think it was always designed that way. But it was a slow evolution, with Peter and Meghan offering bakery pick-up days outside of their Saturday Market appearance and seeing that customers wanted to hang out. They’d walk around the sculpture park, and ask if there was any coffee available. “People just wanted to stay,” says Meghan, and that first summer they put in a bare-bones patio for people, still with nothing else on the menu except their wood-fired breads and baguettes.
With this expansion, and lots of successful pop-up events like pizza nights and multi-course dinner prepared by guest chefs, Meghan and Peter had to make some decisions about what their business was really going to be. In the past year, they’ve really settled on one thing: “we just want to be a bakery,” says Meghan. The pandemic also forced a lot of introspection about their business model, as Meghan and Peter prioritized keeping the bread coming for their community - and their network of local suppliers and food producers - when many other businesses struggled to remain open. They launched an online ordering system that put more products front and centre, and obviously the pop-up dinners and events were put to a halt.
But all of these challenges and changes also solidified Francis as a special place for the community to gather, a thread that carried on through pandemic havoc, delighting people with bread (and free sourdough starter, when we were all in that phase) and treats and a safe space to gather outside. And that online ordering system has strengthened the bakery staff’s relationships with the customers: “I've actually gotten to know our customers way more this year. I think I know all of their names pretty much, because before people just come in and say like, ‘Hi, I kind of recognize you.’ But now they pre-order and so I have their name. And some days I look out in the lineup all the way to the road and I know every single one of those people's names and what they've ordered.” Meghan gets a little choked up here, noting that in many other jobs, “you don’t have that kind of connection.”
