First, it was a flood. Then the oven broke. Then the other oven broke. It’s been a rough few weeks for Blue Spruce General Store in Davenport, according to manager Broc Nelson.
“It’s been a tough month. I think the flooding definitely directed traffic more onto our street, as far as vehicle traffic goes but didn’t do a lot in the way of foot traffic. We’re a young business, we started in October. We’re trying to build up regular customers and regular clients and get new people in as well. With the traffic diversion and the risk of flooding, I think a fair amount of people avoided the downtown area during that time so you know there’s no way of measuring what we could have had.
Fortunately, their building stayed dry during the flooding. “We were safe, the HESCO barriers held true. We’re right across the parking lot from where they were, so there was that looming threat but there was no issue, thankfully, with any of that.”
The equipment issues began last month, according to Nelson. “Around Easter, one of our ovens went down. There’s a fairly expensive special order part that we had to get in. We ran all of our Easter baking out of one oven and then the next day, the second oven broke. It was a different part, so we were able to have the repair person come down and just take the part off of the already broken oven and put it on the top oven.
While this served as a temporary solution, it’s not good for the long term because it takes them twice as long to make the same amount of product, driving up overhead costs and forcing them to cut their offerings.
“We definitely have less items in our pastry cases. We sell out just about every day, but we just can’t keep up with anything more, so it’s really been a challenge of trying to figure out what items we can produce in the least amount of time so that we can have as many things out as possible. It’s been a pivot to try to become as efficient as possible with half of our own capacity.”
They’ve researched options for business assistance, but since they’re still new and have already received loans, they’re not eligible for some forms of assistance until they’ve made a year of payments. That’s one reason they’re raising funds by selling t-shirts. “We talk about community a lot, we focus on our community as a staff, our community as far as the farmers who produce our grain and our produce that we use for our sandwiches and ingredients for our pastries. We like having a strong sense of community and it became a sort of a feeling of ‘well, why don’t we reach out to the community that we like to give back to as much as possible and see if we can’t kind of pull together and make it through this?”
One of Blue Spruce’s bakers is a talented artist who designed the t-shirts, which will be sold as a one-time, limited offer to raise funds to repair the ovens. Shirts can be preordered from their website by clicking here. The deadline for ordering is Sunday, May 21.
