WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM | OCTOBER 1 - 7, 2021 | 25
LAST CALL
Jennifer Lee, local baking phenomenon Veer Mudambi Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
When Jennifer Lee started off ering delivery services from her bakery’s Worcester location at the start of the pandemic, she thought it would be only for a couple of weeks, maybe months, on the outside. Instead, what started as a way to stay afl oat and keep staff employed morphed into an entirely new business model. Now, Jennifer Lee’s Gourmet Bakery is not only surviving but thriving, having gathered something of a cult following in the heart of the Commonwealth. Lee sat down with Last Call to talk about the past year as well
as growing pains and the upcoming move to their new Cambridge Street location. What steps did you take when lockdown fi rst started? The Boston store which we’ve had for 10 years shut down so I realized we needed to pivot. So a week after everything started to shut down and people were staying home, I decided to start doing deliveries. At fi rst, I hired my friends who got laid off to do deliveries all over Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine and Connecticut. But when they went back to their jobs, I didn’t have any delivery drivers and started doing them myself. Within the fi rst year I put 40,0000 miles on my car.
So are you delivering from the Boston location or just Worcester? We bake everything at our Worcester store for both Boston and Worcester. Everything is sourced from this location. At what point did you decide that deliveries were going to be permanent? I originally thought it was just going to be during the pandemic. Just a couple weeks, maybe just a couple months, but it’s still going strong. So I decided that in spring and summer we’d do farmers’ markets, so from May through October and then November through March we’ll be doing deliveries. People really like them — it just makes more
sense for them. It’s just easier to have their favorite treats delivered to their house especially since we’re the only allergen friendly bakery anywhere near here. It’s just more convenient. The Worcester location only opened last year — so did you move the baking set-up there since then? We used to bake out of our Boston stall, but that’s literally 100 to 250 square feet and we were using that for everything — it wasn’t an ideal set-up. So when we heard about the Worcester Public Market, we thought "this makes more sense — we have a lot of customers in Worcester, let’s expand to a second location and bake out of it so we have our
own storefront." Here, the kitchen is about 300 square feet and the storefront is about 250 — we outgrew it in the fi rst month. I thought it was going to be enough and it really wasn’t. The other problem is that it’s very diffi cult for anyone to fi nd us - our front door is on Harding Street and there’s no backdoor so you can’t fi nd me in the market even though we’re attached to it. They assume we’re in the market itself even though we’re not. When will the Public Market location close? We are planning on closing there either mid-October or December 1, we haven’t decided See CALL, Page 31
