Last year was especially trying for ‘Laine’s Bake Shop—Chicago’s artisan bakery with a social mission. The pandemic has been difficult in many ways for most small businesses, but hardship hit even sooner for ‘Laine’s founder and owner Rachel Bernier-Green, when a collapsed kitchen ceiling forced her to close her production location in January 2020. Reflecting on the disaster, Rachel is grateful for the opportunity to step back and consider how her business operates and what she wants it to look like in the future.

After some planning and soul-searching, the bakery landed in a great food and beverage incubator space, The Hatchery Chicago, in February 2020. Their kitchen at The Hatchery is newly equipped with a mechanized cookie machine that will save employees’ arms from scooping dollops from thousands of pounds of dough, and they are saving for a roll-in oven to amp up their production capacity. The first phase of the bakery’s official re-opening plan, an e-commerce platform that’s shipping all over the country, is launching February 5th. You can sign up for updates on how to order here. Wholesale orders and gift packages to meet business-to-business needs are the other primary components of the bakery’s re-imagined business model.

Rachel is looking forward to welcoming back team members who haven’t been working in 2020 due to COVID-19. During their closure, ‘Laine’s has supported their people as best they can, offering compensation when possible, and assisting a couple of employees in finding other jobs. “Almost every team member lost a family member last year, so we didn’t want to put anyone at risk unnecessarily,” Rachel said. For the most part, the team is returning to ‘Laine’s over the next few months. This is a reflection of the strong connections that sustain this visionary bakery, which has since its inception focused on creating an empowering workspace and wealth-building opportunity for previously incarcerated Chicagoans. 

Rachel is a former accounting professional who baked and sold her first cookies alongside her grandmother as a kid. Working with a non-profit during college planted the seed of social enterprise; she liked the values-led work, and wanted to blend that into the fabric of a for-profit business one day. ‘Laine’s Bake Shop came to life as Rachel reduced work stress from her corporate accounting job by baking. Even when she was working 100 hours a week accounting, she baked. All that baking led to popups in partnership with community revitalization efforts in her south side neighborhood. As the business grew, she connected with community partners like Chicago Cred and Growing Home, offering apprenticeships as she built her brick-and-mortar business. Building her bakery by building people’s skills fit the logic and values she wanted to apply to and live out through her business.

Rachel chooses suppliers from a values-based position, too. The chocolate she buys is child-labor free, the spices come from a family business that grinds them freshly, the non-GMO sugar comes from Michigan, and dairy and eggs come from local farms. Grains and flours from AGC farms and mills fit right in with Rachel’s goals of doing business in a manner that supports the whole agricultural supply chain. And she loves working with the fresh flavors, too!

Rachel was featured in CRAFT at Chatham University’s Grains & Revolution Conference last fall, both in a panel discussion of women of color working with grains, and in a demo on how to bake her famous rye brownies. Watching these recordings, you’ll get a very real sense of Rachel’s fun spirit and serious skills...and yes, you’ll want those brownies! (Which, reminder, you can order straight to your kitchen—or couch—very soon!) Keep in touch with new projects coming from ‘Laine’s Bake Shop using the links below.