When you talk to Gary and Sandy Polletta, owners of Edgewood Bakery, Jacksonville, Fla., one of the first things you notice is their love of laughter. You can’t carry on a conversation without one or both or all three of you ending up laughing. The jokes and asides run fast and free. The second thing you notice is the love they have for their bakery family, which includes daughter Krysti Bennett and son Gary Ray Polletta, as well as their employees and customers. Their love of these two things makes the bakery a fun place to work or visit and keeps the Pollettas firmly grounded in their community.

This joie de vivre passes readily from the Pollettas to their employees to their customers and back again. It isn’t unusual to find any of the family chatting (and laughing) with customers. The same goes for their employees. “We don’t want to be a place where people don’t want to come to work,” Sandy says.

But, Krysti adds, “Any time you work with family, you have your moments.” “We tell people when we hire them, you know if you hear something, remember we’re married or we’re family–take what you hear with a grain of salt,” Sandy laughs. “But our whole staff is really like family.”

The family aspect of the bakery has existed since the bakery opened in 1947. The Pollettas are only the third family to own the business. Twenty years ago, Gary and Sandy purchased a 1,700-sq.-ft. space with only five parking spots that was grossing about $100,000 to $120,000 a year. “But if you’re not growing, you’re dead in the water,” Gary says. And the bakery has grown, not only in size but also product line. It has gone from five employees to 20, and sales are now about $1 million a year.

About five years ago, the operation outgrew its physical space. The Pollettas looked into expanding their current building as well as moving the bakery completely.

Edgewood Bakery offers a variety of products packaged for grab-and-go sales. Displays are rearranged weekly to keep up customer interest.

“This is an older neighborhood, but we opted not to move out of the area because this is our base and our home,” Krysti says. Instead, they found the ideal location right across the parking lot, a corner building with 6,000 sq. ft. and more than 29,000 sq. ft. of parking space. The property also included a 1,500-sq.-ft. building, a former training center, which the Pollettas turned into a banquet facility.

To cause as little disruption as possible, Sandy, Krysti and Gary Ray continued to run the bakery in the original building from September to the end of December while Gary spent the time in the new building overseeing the remodeling. The original bakery closed its doors Christmas Eve 2005, and eight days later, Edgewood Bakery opened in its new facility. Until 2009, the bakery had traditionally closed the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so the move didn’t cause any lost sales. The new building featured 2,000 sq. ft. of retail space, including a separate room for wedding cake consultations, and 4,000 sq. ft. dedicated to production, storage and office space.

The larger bakery with its additional overhead did affect profits the first couple of years, but Gary likens the bakery business to a teeter totter. “We’re still pushing the teeter totter down, and the only way to do that is to increase your business. It’s a neverending battle,” Gary says. “When you’re aggressive, once you do get the teeter totter down, you do something else and you go right back up. But you’re constantly building that way.”

Becoming a bakery café

The new bakery allowed for a foodservice kitchen to be tucked into the production area. With a kitchen, Edgewood began offering a full breakfast and lunch menu in 2009. The bakery sells handmade burgers, salads and a variety of sandwiches and sides for lunch. The breakfast menu includes omelets, breakfast wraps, French toast and quiches.

Production Manager Gary Ray Polletta helps train the externs that come to the bakery from area colleges.

The germ of the new menu began developing shortly after the move. Krysti had the idea to offer biscuits in the morning, and sales took off. To build on that, she decided to offer a few packaged sandwiches in a cooler at the front of the store. Then, she added some salads.

“It just kept growing,” Krysti says. “That’s how the café really started to come along, from just that little old biscuit. The diversification really helped when we needed to make a change because people weren’t coming in anymore just to pick up that little bakery item. It’s been fun and interesting to watch it grow. I never thought five years ago that this is what we’d be doing.”

An added bonus of the lunch menu is it makes it easier to introduce new bakery products. All lunches include a cookie or a sample dessert, which allows Edgewood to showcase different products and get customers to try new items. The seating also provides a captive audience, which makes it easy to sample new products. “Sometimes if we’re making something new, we’ll take it out and give it to the people who are eating,” Gary says.

“It gives people who might not want to buy it a chance to taste it. Then, they’ll talk about it to someone. It’s always about keeping that excitement going,” Sandy adds.

And, they have found many customers are unfailingly honest. If they think a product is terrible, they say it, Gary says. But it gives him a chance to find out what they don’t like, and that’s the kind of feedback a bakery needs. The key is to make what the customers want or like, not what you like, he adds.

“There are many things we would love to make, but there’s not a market for them,” he says. It took the bakery years to be able to sell cannolis. The Pollettas would put them out in the showcase, customers would ask about them, and the staff would explain the product. Then, the customers would buy a glazed donut because the glazed donut was what they wanted.

Continue on next page