Whether you’re getting bread, cake, cookies, muffins, or something else, we can all agree that fresh baked from a bakery is always better than store-bought. It’s essential to find a local bakery in your area for all of your baked good needs.
But wait–many of the big grocery store chains have their own bakeries now! It’s still fresh baked, and they have everything you need. So can’t you still just go to the grocery store for your cakes and muffins? No. You should still always buy them from a local, independently owned bakery. Here are a few reasons why.
Ingredients
Just because something is fresh baked by a professional, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth eating. As an experiment, go to the nearest big chain grocery store, and look at the listed ingredients on some of the items in their bakery. Chances are, it’s filled with preservatives, chemicals, artificial colors and flavors, and a lot of ingredients you can barely pronounce. These ingredients are designed to make their baked goods look sleek and shiny, but it sacrifices taste in the process.
A local, independent bakery is more likely to use all-natural ingredients. The resulting baked goods might not look as sleek and shiny, but instead, they’ll look real—a rustic, often imperfect look that lets you know that this pie or cake or batch of cookies is made with love and tradition. And, more importantly, they’ll taste worlds better.
Variety
The grocery store bakery and its facilities may be bigger than your local, independent bakery, but somehow there will still be items you can only find at the independent one. That’s because the grocery store has to keep up with the demands of the masses: common things like brownies and chocolate chip cookies, apple pie and chocolate cake, sourdough and brioche. A larger bakery in a more metropolitan area may have things like babka and challah.
But an independent, local bakery will often have items that are more off the beaten path—including items that are specifically unique to that bakery. There could be unusual flavor combinations that turn out to be really good, but which never would have been considered except by experimentation and trial and error.
Grocery store bakeries, as big as they are, don’t really have room for experimentation. If a new item does become available, the recipe was likely handed down to them from a corporate test kitchen on the other side of the country. They lack that unique personalization that you get from a local bakery.
Commerce
When you buy from the bakery in your grocery store, you’re supporting a huge chain that likely has branches all over the country. You’re supporting a CEO, a board of directors, and a bunch of shareholders.
When you buy from a local, independent bakery, you’re supporting real, hardworking people. It may be family owned and have been in that same location for decades. Or it may have been started a few months ago by some young, fresh-faced baker, just out of culinary school, who wants to leave their mark.
When you support local businesses like independent bakeries, you’re supporting your community and investing in people’s dreams, in their histories, and in their futures. When you buy from a chain grocery store, you’re taking business away from those local bakeries and making it more difficult for them to stay open.
You get better baked goods, a unique and personalized selection, and the opportunity to invest in real people and real businesses, rather than faceless corporations. With all that in mind, why would you buy your from anywhere else but your local bakery?
Visit our main cakes page to search for local bakeries and dessert shops in your area!