Local Food Champion of the Season
ADDRESS: 648 SW 2nd St Suite 120, Corvallis, OR 97333
Phone: 541-754-7040
Website: wildyeastcorvallis.com
Hours: Tues–Sat, 8am–2pm
Closed: Sun, Mon
OWNERS: April and Craig Hall Cutting
YEARS IN BUSINESS: 13
WHAT THEY SELL: Sourdough breads, pastries, Swedish cardamom buns, scones, quick breads cookies, focaccia, baguettes
WHERE YOU CAN GET THEIR PRODUCTS: Wild Yeast Bakery, farmers’ markets in Corvallis and Albany, First- Alternative Co-op and Market of Choice in Corvallis, and Oceana Natural Foods Co-op in Newport
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 13-14
WHY YOU SHOULD GO: The simplest reason to support Wild Yeast Bakery is the quality of the fresh sourdough bread, which is absolutely scrumptious. My favorites are the Oregon country sourdough and the baguettes, but many people wait all week for the Swedish cardamom buns. In addition, this bakery is on a mission to make the world better through food.
When April and Craig began baking bread in 2013 out of their home kitchen, they were setting out to make delicious nutritious sourdough bread with local and organic ingredients to encourage healthy eating, support local agriculture, and keep money flowing in the local economy. This may sound simple, but nearly all grain today is part of a global industrial food system that values cheapness, long shelf life, and quantity above all else. Local organic grain milled nearby has nearly disappeared. Even so, for more than a decade, Wild Yeast Bakery has remained true to their goals as they’ve grown.
WILD YEAST BAKERY’S ORIGIN STORY:
Craig: It was a decision April and I made when we went on a personal retreat at the beginning of 2013. April and I were both pastors of the United Methodist Church. At that time, she was serving the Sweet Home Church and I was a chaplain at the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn. April was getting ready for a career change, and we talked about what we wanted to do next in our lives. We had always been bread bakers at home. We were very interested in sourdough, and natural processes, and local ingredients. We decided to see if we could bake bread for people. So we took classes, learned how to do it, went to workshops, and got started. I continued to (be a chaplain) until the middle of 2016, so April is the one who did most of the work for the first few years, although I helped her in mornings and afternoons and weekends.
WHAT IS THE MISSION OF WILD YEAST BAKERY?
Craig: Baking local organic grain into delicious artisan bread is a summation of our goals. We try to use things as close to home as possible and we use organic ingredients to a large extent because our goals are to produce a healthy product to support people’s health, use the local economy to support local business, and use local grains and ingredients to support local agriculture. That’s what we’re about: health for people, for the earth, and for our economy. Nobody else is doing what we are doing.
WHERE DO YOU SOURCE YOUR INGREDIENTS?
Craig: We try to get as close as we can, so it’s either local or regional. This is very intentional. When we first started, we got grain from Green Willow Grain right across the Willamette River, but they are no longer around. So now most of our flour comes from Camas Country Mill in Eugene (whole wheat, rye, and barley). Their grain either comes from the Willamette Valley, the Klamath basin, eastern Oregon, and a bit from Northern California. White flour grain is grown in Oregon, shipped to Central Milling in northern Utah, and comes back to us. We get the espresso flour (for the baguettes) from Cairnsping Mill in Washington; it’s gown in eastern Washington and milled in the Scagit valley.
We use a number of farmers’ market vendors for our fresh ingredients: mushrooms, fruits, onions, vegetables, things like that that. Our first choice is always to find those from somebody who’s growing it locally rather than looking for what might be cheapest. If we can’t find it then we go to the co-op to get it. We don’t go to Cisco for things. So that’s the one place where things aren’t always organic, sometimes we’d rather shop with somebody that we know who has good practices but isn’t necessarily certified.
ARE THERE OTHER WAYS WILD YEAST CONTRIBUTES TO THE COMMUNITY?
Craig: Every week, leftover breads go to the South Corvallis Food Bank and to Stone Soup. The daytime drop in center gets leftover pastries. And then we occasionally we’ll do a gift certificate for an organization that’s doing a fundraiser, to support their goals. We try to focus on things that help directly with food or housing. We work here in this area on B Avenue where there’s a lot of unhoused people. We only sell our baguettes the first day they are baked. Almost every day we might have a baguette or two or six left over and we just put ‘em out on the bench for people to pick up. There are never any left!
One other thing we do for the community is we got qualified for SNAP, so we can take EBT for people who use SNAP. And that was important to us because we know we have an expensive product, and we still want people to be able to get it if they can. We do have solar panels on the roof, which are pretty minimal compared to the amount of power we use, but they make some difference.
HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE RESILIENCE OF YOUR BUSINESS IN THE FACE OF DISRUPTIONS TO THE FOOD SYSTEM IN A DESTABlLIZNG WORLD?
Craig: We have certainly thought about it. That was one of the things about doing things locally was that if there are big disruptions we still know how to make whole wheat bread. There are things we could do even if things got pretty crazy. There’s certain things we’re doing now that we couldn’t do anymore. For instance, the cardamom seeds come from Guatemala. But if we couldn’t get those anymore, it wouldn’t put the bakery out of business.
When COVID came, and everything got crazy, we had very few problems, because we weren’t getting things from overseas that got caught. And then when tariffs hit they raised a few prices on things but it was pretty minimal for us.
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
Craig: Our biggest challenge is making a profit. And that’s because we’re in the food business where there’s so much competition. Food is a basic thing, and people have a lot of thoughts about how much they can afford. Everybody’s always wanting to get the cheapest thing, and we’re not the cheapest thing. Often, we’re the most expensive thing. And even then, we can’t pay our staff well. Everybody gets more than minimum wage but not much more. So that makes it hard to keep staff, and that means we spend a lot of time training, and it just makes it hard. We wish we could pay people a full living wage and we can’t do that, even charging what we charge for the product.
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST REWARD?
Craig: The rewards are the gratified customers. Everybody on staff loves to do farmers’ markets because of the interactions with people, and being able to help people have a good day or be happy or enjoy something.
(Interview and article by Carla Wise)
The Local Food Champion of the Season is a project of the Food Action Team that highlights nearby farms and food businesses growing, producing, and preparing foods using practices which renew and enrich the land and community.