What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath A Baker
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Jan 27, 2026 Sophie Williams, owner and baker at Raven Bakery in Bellingham who bikes her deliveries and works with local whole grains. She talks about tinkering recipes like a gingerbread that needed hotter baking, adapting to variable local rye harvests, running a bike-based community bakery, scaling from solo baker to team leader, and the physical craft of preserving bodies and workflow.
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Learning By Selling Bad Bread
- Sophie sold consistently poor bread her first year and learned humility from public failure.
- Financial dependence forced her to bring ugly bread to market and improve through exposure.
Local Grain Shapes Business Choices
- Raven Bakery sources all grains from Washington and Oregon and runs deliveries by bicycle.
- Local sourcing shapes logistics and enables an environmentally driven business model.
A Decade To Crack Gingerbread
- Sophie iteratively tweaked a gingerbread cake recipe for nearly a decade before solving consistency.
- The fix was baking it 25°F hotter, discovered through systematic tests and logs.
