There's no shortage of boulangeries in Paris, Johanna Hartzheim, co-founder of bakery delivery subscription company Wildgrain, tells Entrepreneur. "It's such a cultural thing to have a fresh baguette. You buy a baguette every day, fresh croissants on every corner. It's always warm because they churn bread so much that [every time] you go in, [it] just came out of the oven."
Image Credit: Courtesy of Wildgrain. Johanna Hartzheim.
So, when Hartzheim and her husband and co-founder Ismail Salhi moved from France's capital to Boston in 2015 to work on their music hardware company Qleek, the local carb options weren't cutting it.
Unlike Europe, the U.S. didn't offer fresh-baked bread and pastries block by block. Goods sat on bakery shelves longer, and those in supermarkets often came with a laundry list of unfamiliar ingredients, including fillers and shelf stabilizers. "That's not right," Hartzheim says. "Bread should be flour, water and salt. That's it."
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Hartzheim had always loved baking, but she'd been "a little afraid" of bread, which comes with a unique set of challenges. However, motivated by the lack of choices and wanting to eat as well as possible while pregnant with she and Salhi's first child, she turned to a friend's father, who'd been making sourdough for years, for mentorship.
Soon, she was spending every weekend learning the ins and outs of bread-baking, and it wasn't long before she could produce more than she and her family could enjoy.
"For sourdough, if you make one loaf or 20 or 50, it's the same amount of work because it's the time that goes into it," Hartzheim explains. "The night before, you have to refresh the start, and then the next day, you have to mix the dough, let it sit, and then, every hour, fold the dough. So if you just size up the overall volume, it doesn't change........