Village Baking Co. bakery opens second store in Dallas

Have you ever gotten rid of your sourdough hobby during this pandemic? Have you tried making croissants? Village Baking Co. has opened its second store in Dallas, and its co-owners are betting on the idea that you’d rather leave baking to the pros. After all, it takes 48 hours for their bakers to make a batch of croissants.

On January 12, the co-owners opened a new Village Baking Co. on Travis Street in Dallas, a short walk from the Katy Trail. It’s a Dallas neighborhood that co-founder Clint Cooper says he’s been eyeing for 15 years.

“There’s a need for a neighborhood bakery, and we’re trying to meet it,” says Cooper. He co-founded the company with his wife, Kim Cooper.

The company operates an existing bakery and café on Lowest Greenville. It’s popular with bread connoisseurs, and customers come from all over Dallas-Fort Worth to purchase their baguettes and croissants.

The shop has a sweet history, which begins with Clint Cooper attending a cooking school in San Francisco, then traveling across France “to learn every detail of French pastry and French bread.” The Coopers opened a bakery in Colleyville in 2004, then moved on to wholesale bread making and sale at farmers’ markets.

Working weekends at farmers’ markets in towns like Coppell, McKinney, and others helped the Coops build a customer base who loved fresh bread.

Today, the company’s two restaurants serve a range of French pastries such as pain au chocolat (a chocolate croissant), financiers, kouign-amann, and bacon-cheddar croissants. The shop also sells croque monsieur and reuben sandwiches as well as quiches.

At the new store near Highland Park, customers can dine indoors at two tables or sit outside at one of seven tables. The stores in Greenville and Travis are designed to feel comfortable and confined, traits that extend to the business plan.

“The idea is to have small store footprints and deliver high quality bread, consistently,” says Clint Cooper. All of the bread is made in a bakehouse in the Dallas Design District. Centralizing this process makes it easier to reproduce a quality product, explains Seth Bame, co-owner.

Sitting inside the stores, which look like French cafes, customers would probably not realize that 80% of Village Baking Co.’s business sells bread to large corporations. Village Baking Co. bakers make all of the sliced ​​bread and croissants for 7-Eleven’s 700 stores in Texas. They also provide much of the bread for Hello Fresh, the meal kit delivery service.

“The key idea here is that we put the same details in the hundreds of thousands of hamburger buns we make each year, like we make a simple croissant, our # 1 salesperson in retail stores,” says Clint Cooper .

Eventually, the business will likely expand to other areas of Dallas, says co-owner Mark Plunkett.

The team signed the lease on Travis Street just over three months ago, with the intention of offering a takeout – bread and coffee – at a time when customers are ordering more food than ever before. to take away.

“We connected with people and they connected with us,” Bame says. “That’s really what drove us to go to this next place.

Village Baking Co. is located at 4539 Travis St., Dallas. It opened on January 12, 2021. Food and drinks are available on site and to take away.

For more food information, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.