From Scratch: Our Flagship Story

Building something from scratch—now there’s a concept we know well at The Women’s Bakery. From our founders who built our Bakery in A Box model from the ground up, to the women in each of our bakery locations around East Africa that bake highly nutritious bread from locally sourced ingredients: we build things from scratch daily. It’s part of our culture: we push, strive, overcome and accomplish in order to further our mission of empowering women through business and education.

We are strong women baking bread... and building financial models, breaking into new markets, recipe testing, operating, organizing, and training. The list is endless.

Our most recent building project, quite literally, has been our effort to create a new Flagship Bakery: a space to propel our brand, display the ultimate success of our model, and sell nutritious bread. The Women’s Bakery Flagship is an inviting environment for Kigali, Rwanda customers to enjoy, interact and collaborate in while learning about and supporting our social enterprise model. It’s a space with higher production capacity to meet growing market demands, a hub for TWB product and marketing innovation, a centralized training center for future TWB programs, a single office location for cohesion as a bakery and organization.

It’s a model for TWB bakeries everywhere.

Building something from scratch takes work. It takes grit. It takes passion and endurance. But those are things that the staff at The Women’s Bakery embodies well. It has been an inspiration to see everyone put their hands to the challenging task of doing something we’ve never done before. But we’re doing it. We’re building it up from scratch: design, processes, systems, products. And it’s going to be AWESOME. It’s going to showcase #breadpower and we cannot wait to share it with you.

Coming soon, The Women’s Bakery Flagship.

Incorporating New Technology – Bakery Growth Pains & Gains

With our exciting move into the Kigali Flagship, TWB has spent the last month in the thick of readjustments, and lots of furniture moving!

While the transition has been a bit stressful and chaotic at times, as one would imagine when combining three entities into one (Kigali Bakery + training center + TWB offices), the results are already proving positive. The bakery took only one day off from operations to transition, and has been increasing production ever since in the larger production space. Meanwhile, the training center is already hosting its first training- TWB’s Bakery Operations Manager Training pilot program, and the company offices are happy to be closer to the Kigali bakery women, as well as the fresh daily bread! 

One of the most exciting, and challenging, new adjustments to the bakery production in Kigali is the use of technical baking equipment, including electric mixers and a three-deck gas oven. While the Kigali baking team was naturally skeptical when we first introduced the new oven and began running tests to ensure the quality and consistency of our bread, everyone has quickly learned new procedures and adopted the giant metal box that clicks and beeps and rings alarms into their daily operations. Within the first week of using the gas oven, the baking team shaved nearly 2 hours from their production time! And, the oven masters no longer have to juggle feeding the fire and monitoring the heat all while baking delicious breads to perfection.  

Over the next few weeks we will also fully incorporate the electric mixers, with the assistance and guidance of our Corporate Sponsor Rademaker to ensure the process. 

We are grateful and excited to take these next steps towards growth in Kigali, and we look forward to improving our efficiency and impact by incorporating better technology!