Inspiring Conversations with Emily Verbeke of Foundry Bakehouse and Deli

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Verbeke.

Hi Emily, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today. 
I was born and raised in the Albion area, and when I had my chance to go off to school, Albion College felt like the best fit. I would have gone to Albion no matter where it was; it just happened to be in my hometown. 

I lived on campus all four years, and each time they closed the dorms for breaks, I was one of the last to leave and head home, even though I had the shortest commute. Entrepreneurship and running small businesses have also been a constant in my life, from the caster manufacturing company my grandfather started in his mid-60s to the independent family medicine practice my dad and his brothers opened after graduating from medical school. 

My mother also always had projects that earned money and would now be described as “side hustles.” 

Colleges, even liberal arts colleges, aren’t the best at making pathways for entrepreneurship; they’re still typically geared toward graduates joining existing businesses and organizations. So, I didn’t necessarily see a clear path for how I might join our family business in the future. I wanted to be confident that I could contribute to the business and add value to it, not the business adding value to me. 

So, I pursued a different path. I graduated Albion College with a degree in psychology and music performance, with an emphasis in human services. I then graduated from the University of Denver with an education specialist degree (Ed.S.) in child, family, and school psychology. 

I started working as a school psychologist, primarily with elementary and middle school students. I genuinely enjoyed connecting with the communities I worked in through the support and services I provided to children and families. Every day was different, and the constant problem-solving was where I excelled and enjoyed my work. I also experienced frustration, knowing that many systems outside of my control needed changes that I couldn’t necessarily influence or impact. 

My husband was feeling similarly in his band director teaching position, so we started to explore ways to connect and be part of the community through something we had more control over. So, we opened a frozen yogurt store in the Detroit area. We operated that one location for almost five years and learned a tremendous amount about business, accounting, marketing (especially local marketing that drives traffic across a threshold, not just to a website), and how to provide value to the community from a for-profit position. 

In the fall of 2017, our family business, under the leadership of my dad, Bill Dobbins, and my brother, Andrew Dobbins, was working to position Caster Concepts (CCI) for long-term success by focusing on employee retention. Through their work, the CCI team turned their focus to the community where their employees live and raise families. They asked, is Albion a place where employees want to raise their families? Is it a place with a strong quality of life that will keep people here? The answer was “not quite.” 

Albion has been through many challenges and significant declines in services, available employment, and population with the closing of manufacturing industries and the community hospital. For many years, Albion was waiting for someone to create a turnaround for the community. 

Not simultaneously, but in close proximity, some Albion College alumni (my dad included) and the team at CCI started to talk about and work on how they could impact economic development in Albion. It was sort of an “if not us, who?” mindset that propelled my parents to focus their attention on Albion’s historic downtown. They seized the opportunity to purchase Albion’s oldest brick building, on the corner of a key intersection in Albion. They started working on a historic restoration of that building with four apartments upstairs and up to two commercial spaces downstairs. 

When my parents told me, my siblings, and our spouses about the situation, my husband and I left that family gathering with the same thought in our mind: that my parents would need help with this, and it would be the time and our opportunity to move back to Albion and find ways to add value to the businesses. 

So, in the fall of 2017, we started planning to move back to Albion at the end of our son’s school year. I left the field of school psychology and immediately started working on moving some of the ideas and projects forward that we believed supported the Albion community. The biggest was attempting to find a bakery to move into the Peabody building, which would be ready in late 2018. 

In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising that every area bakery we contacted was not interested in expanding and opening a location in Albion. However, our family has a track record (good or bad) in that if we can’t find someone to do something we think is worth doing, we’ll figure out how to do it ourselves. This thought process applied to the bakery, and we started figuring out how to run a bakery — how hard can it be? It turns out hard! We connected with a local baker, Paige Young, who had recently moved back to the area after running her own bakery in South Carolina. She came on board with us as a bakery consultant, and we worked with her to develop our menu, hone recipes, and provide training to new employees (many of whom did not have any culinary school experience because there aren’t any schools nearby for culinary arts) and helped us plan the physical space of the bakery. We were lucky to have access to a local incubator kitchen in Albion to do all of our testing and get things just right. 

We unlocked the doors of the new space in the Peabody building in April 2019. Having taken the lead on this project, I grew into the position of general manager of the bakery. Since April 2019, we’ve been chugging along honing our menu and offerings, adding new items regularly, and growing the business. At the same time of growing the bakery, as a family, we’ve worked to launch several other downtown businesses and contribute to Albion’s economic development. Those businesses and organizations include a full-service marketing business (BrickStreet Marketing), a locally focused retail gift shop (Pure Albion), a co-working space (The Office Albion), a downtown grocery and convenience store (Superior Street Mercantile), a robotics and advanced engineering tech hub (InnovateAlbion), a premium cigar bar (The Ryan Club), and most recently, an e-sports and computer gaming center (XP412 Gaming). 

So, all of these businesses work together and support each other, including the manufacturing businesses that are part of our community of businesses. An example of this is that the bakery buys produce from Superior Street Mercantile, and the bakery also makes and sells items to Superior Street Mercantile, such as some take-and-bake options. The manufacturing businesses also buy lunches and birthday cakes for employees from the bakery, providing some consistent recurring revenue for the bakery. BrickStreet Marketing provides marketing support to the community of businesses and Caster Concepts, but also to other businesses in the area. Each of these projects, including the bakery, enables me to do what I do best and what I enjoy doing, which is problem-solving, understanding systems, finding ways to improve products, and serving the community. 

Each of these businesses is a commitment to the community: to provide people with places to eat, shop, learn, and spend time in their community with family and friends. The residents of Albion deserve these places; they have accepted “a good enough for Albion” mentality for too long, which, in reality, wasn’t good enough for anyone, anywhere. The residents of Albion and the visitors to Albion deserve better, and that’s what we’re working on every day. 

The Foundry is a love letter to the community. It lets them know that our past identity of being a place where making things from our hands and from nothing still has value; we can just do it in a new way, like taking flour, water, and yeast to make delicious bread. We’re part of other organizations and businesses also working to raise the bar for what the community and visitors to Albion expect. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We were just about to share plans for how the bakery was going to celebrate its first anniversary when the governor announced that Michigan was shutting down for two weeks. We quickly established that the bakery was an essential business, providing necessities (bread) to the community as well as feeding area businesses that were identified as essential businesses. 

We fed employees of area manufacturing businesses a couple of times a week for several months. It was a challenge for some employees to wrap their minds around how the bakery was essential — even though it was clear to me — and so we did lose people in those first couple months; they were as scared and uncertain as we all were at that time. 

Soon after the start of the pandemic, we decided that it was time to offer some of the items we had talked about but couldn’t do early on, which were take-and-bake items. We started with potpies, and we offered preorders for potpies and added more take-and-bake options each week. We would presell 100+ potpies a week and do similarly with other take-and-bake options. These were challenges and opportunities simultaneously, and the team we had at the time worked hard to serve the community’s needs. This also meant that I came into the kitchen and started working full-time alongside my mom, and my sister, Caroline, helped out as well. 

So, in addition to attempting to navigate the financial implications of a global pandemic on a business that was only a year old, we were exhausted from working and putting out the products the customers wanted and needed during that time. As things opened up and we slowly started to get back to “normal,” the challenges have continued regarding reaching new customers, bringing on new team members, and providing all the on-the-job training/skills necessary to put out our products with the consistency and quality that our regular customers expect. 

Other challenges include working to grow the business in an age of rising costs and being among a small group of companies and organizations grinding toward moving Albion’s economic-development needle. It’s all challenging, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about Foundry Bakehouse and Deli?
As a small-town local bakery, the Foundrey Bakehouse and Deli specializes in doing it all. We make bread daily, which is used on our sandwiches, so the bread just elevates all of our sandwich offerings. 

We also make donuts fresh every morning before transitioning into making cookies, muffins, danishes, pastries, dessert bars, etc.; we have a delicious breakfast sandwich that has fluffy baked eggs, your choice of protein, and cheese, all nestled in our house-made buns. We also make a variety of bagels. Some of our dessert bars, such as our key lime pie bar and chocolate lasagna, are some of the most popular items we have year-round. 

We rotate other seasonal things that our customers love, such as cranberry oatmeal cookies and other seasonal sandwich and salad specials. With our take-and-bake offerings, our chicken and turkey potpies are the best sellers. They’ve become so popular that we’re now offering a selection of our take-and-bake items to other retailers, and we’ve been working to grow our wholesale business with potpies, quiches, and pizza cupcakes. 

Our team loves taking on challenges and new things, so if someone has an idea for something and shares their suggestion, there is a good chance we’ll see if we can make something great either just for that customer or add it to our regular rotation. I’d also love readers to know you don’t have to travel to Albion to enjoy Foundry cookies. We ship boxes of cookies in various sizes and offerings. We also offer corporate gift boxes, and we handle of all the legwork, including custom-branded messaging and the shipping. 

Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
A frame of mind that has served me and our team well along the way is that your problems or challenges are NOT 100% unique to you, and there are likely others out there who have solved the same or similar issues in the past. 

We should never be hesitant to reach out to others and ask questions. Most people are willing to share their knowledge and experience; they won’t necessarily do it for you, but they’ll undoubtedly share tips and resources. 

I’m pretty insatiable in my drive to find answers to questions, and asking more questions and being curious is one of the best ways to learn. Never be afraid to say, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.foundrybakehouse.com
• Instagram: @foundrybakehouse
• Facebook: facebook.com/foundrybakehouse
• Twitter: twitter.com/FoundryBake
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzlZv1umWsuqJOqFuJB7qzg/about
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/foundry-bakehouse-and-deli-albion

Image Credits
BrickStreet Marketing