Top: Costeaux’s dessert case; above: Triple chocolate mousse cake with layers ofdark, white and milk chocolate topped with a handmade chocolate rose.

In 2006, all baking moved to a 6,500 sq. ft. facility about one-half mile from the retail store. The building has a receiving door, which proved beneficial when the bakery had to switch flour mills and began buying flour by the truckload. It also allowed the bakery to add equipment. “I want to improve efficiencies and reduce labor costs, but only as long as it doesn't effect quality,” Will says.

The baking facility houses a walk-in refrigerator and freezer, two divider/rounders — one for rolls up to 2 ozs. and the other goes up to 4 1/4 ozs. — a 350-lb. capacity spiral mixer, six vertical mixers, a baguette moulder, a three-door retarder, a proofer, a double rack oven (with the capacity for another) and a four-deck hearth oven with an oven loader. A separate room is dedicated to pastry production, where a staff of four makes almost all products, including cookies, from scratch.

Bread production begins at 4:30 p.m. with dough mixing and sour preparation. Costeaux has 12 employees on its bread baking staff. After mixing, dividing and shaping, long fermentation bread products are placed in bread boxes and retarded overnight. Then, products are proofed and baked the next day for delivery in the morning. Costeaux delivers six days a week in about a 100-mile radius with three trucks on the road. A fourth and fifth route will be added soon. Its full line of bread is available for wholesale accounts. Wholesale pastry products are limited mostly to cookies, muffins and Danish.

Renovating retail space

With production moved to a separate facility, the Seppi family had to decide how to best use the space in the retail location. They toyed with ideas for 18 months before beginning renovations in June 2008, coinciding with the bakery's 85th birthday year. The $350,000 project was completed by October and featured additional café seating, a wedding cake consultation room, a mezzanine that currently houses office space, a new café kitchen and a redesigned product showcase area. The building's concrete walls were exposed and the skylights were opened up. A designer helped bring the cosmetic aspects of the space in line with the bakery's French roots.

With the renovation, the showcase space was actually reduced. “We cut our dessert case by a third and our cookie case in half of what it used to be because we either were making too much stuff just to fill the cases, or we didn't make enough and the cases looked empty,” Will said. He and his staff made a conscious decision to limit the number of products the bakery offered in order to keep the quality up to Costeaux customers' high standards. The products that were not making money or were too expensive to produce were revamped or eliminated altogether.

“Just because you like something doesn't mean you need to be making it,” Will says. “My favorite was a raspberry tart, but we had to spend $12 for the fresh raspberries alone, which would come to about a $50 tart. We're not going to make that.”

“That's one of the things that Will has really improved—the pricing and breaking down of numbers,” Nancy adds.

With the smaller display footprint, front-end employees can keep the cases looking neat and full by pulling product from reach-in display cases behind the retail sales counter. A bread rack behind the counter displays the six to eight varieties available.

On the pastry side, about a dozen different items with several varieties are available daily from a list of about 100 retail products. For example, six to eight cookie varieties are displayed daily, four different flavors of muffins, two types of croissants, four varieties of Danish, three coffee rings and eight to 10 tarts and cakes, many of which are offered in 6-in. and 8-in. rounds as well as by the slice. The retail store receives delivery of product from the production facility about three times a day.

The newly designed space also features several movable display shelves that hold the bakery's packaged products as well as teas, coffees and other items. The movable shelves afford flexibility in display configurations and can open up the space for parties.