Great Harvest Rises to the Challenge

Before you even get to see how the bread is made, Jeremy St. Hilaire is providing you with a window into what makes his corner bakery tick.

He's puffing up a little as he shows off all the cottage-industry products on his front shelves, manufactured as close to home as possible, without sacrificing quality.

Like the Saratoga Peanut Butter made in New York. St. Hilare takes a jar of Monkey Boy off the shelf and turns it around for a look at the ingredients.

"Dry roasted nuts, bananas and raisins. It doesn't get more clean-label than that," he says, with pride. "If I could find a good peanut butter manufacturer here, believe me, I'd get them on the shelf, too."

It's a pride that comes from doing business the way he believes business should be done; with personal attention to detail.

He includes local ingredients in his bread recipes judiciously. Using the honey from Hillside Apiaries in Merrimack, for example, is like pouring liquid gold into the mix.

"It's just too expensive to use all the time, but we do use it," St. Hilaire said. Ditto that, the maple syrup from Ben's Sugar Shack in Temple, or the cheddar cheese from Shelburne Farms in Vermont.

"One thing I insisted on was using pure maple syrup here. That's not something the company does nationwide, but for customers here, it was important," St. Hilaire says.

What he loves about operating his own business, even though it's part of a national franchise, is that he has the freedom to call the shots, as long as his basic bread recipes are consistent.

"Great Harvest is in line with the morals and ideals that I stand for, like how to treat customers. We want to be part of this neighborhood, and so it's important to make it a sustainable business that increases the local economy around us. Our families have lived in the area for 30 years, so yes, we're invested in this community," St. Hilare said.

His father-in-law, Sterling Eanes, puts the "we" in "we work hard to make this work." Great Harvest launched April 15 as a true family enterprise. Along with his father-in-law, wife Ginger, and wee ones Logan, 5, and Colton, 1, St. Hilaire is looking forward to starting something that can be passed on to his kids. He's putting his lifelong love of cooking and baking into everything that goes on at Great Harvest, which has about 225 bakeries around the country.

"The only thing we're required to do is use the wheat they supply – and it just happens to be the best wheat in the world, from Montana," says St. Hilaire, scooping a handful of wheatberries from a giant paper bag and cradling it in both hands.

The fact that it ends up looking like a heart-shaped handful of vital ingredients is sheer coincidence.

By the way, if you haven't yet been to the bakery, it's more than just bread.

Most days Debbie Bull is up front icing the muffins, cinnamon rolls, babkas and scones as they come out of the oven, deftly fielding breakfast and lunch orders in between. The staff is a baker's dozen of devoted employees starting with the actual bakers, who arrive at 2 a.m. to get things started.

Carving out a niche in a world where mom-and-pop bakeries have, for the most part, disappeared shouldn't be so hard. But what's happened is that chain supermarkets and department stores have also added impressive arrays of baked goods to their shelves.

St. Hilaire, 33, is up for the challenge, mostly because he knows his baked goods are top quality and his pesonal touch, pretty irresistable.

"The density of our Dakota loaf, for example; it's incredible," he says, slicing a thick chunk of still-steaming bread from a toasted mound covered in pumpkin seeds. "It's power packed with 100 percent whole wheat, three kinds of seeds, and millet. No high fructose sweetner. Just taste it," he says.

While most good reporters would decline the freebie, smart reporters with a weakness for fresh-baked breads not only take the bait, but report, accurately and objectively, that it could very well be the best bread known to humanity.

St. Hilaire still hasn't gotten around to showing off the heart of the operation, where the bread dough is made. He's stalled out near an old cast-iron stove.

"This belonged to the grange hall in Avon, Maine. It's where my great-grandfather was president. Years ago the old hall was collapsing and he got a call that if there was anything anybody wanted, it was time to go salvage stuff, so he painstakingly took this apart, piece by piece, and gave it to my mom. It sat in our basement for years," he said.

"I knew that when we opened Great Harvest I wanted it to be a centerpiece. It's at the heart of what we do; it reminds me of why we're doing this: sustaining a small family farm in Montana while providing something unique, made right here in Nashua. Something people just can't get elsewhere," St. Hilaire says.

One of his goals is to be the Alec's Shoe Store of bread, St. Hilaire says.

"I got my first pair of shoes there when I was a kid, and my two boys got their first pair there. I want to be like Alec's because it's not so much about the shoes as it is about the service. It's why a downtown shoe store like that is still successful in this economy when you can, no doubt, buy the same shoes elsewhere for less," he says.

Just then Sarah Catrambone of Amherst whirls in through the front door and quickly fills her official Great Harvest travel mug. Within seconds, she's headed back out the door, without paying.

"She pays for a week's worth of coffee so she can just get in and get out," St. Hilaire says, on her behalf.

"I come in on Saturday and buy some bread before I go shopping. My daughter and I actually get to sit down together and enjoy it," Catrombone says, as she backs her way out the door.

St. Hilaire says the fact that he uses whole beans for his coffee exclusively from A&E Roastery in Amherst is another draw for regulars like Catrombone.

"A&E is not a bakery, and I'm not a barrista, but we cross promote. I feel like if we're going to have coffee, then we should have the best," he says.

At 5 a.m. two more bakers arrive to help knead the bread and braid the Challah loaves, all made the same way, proficiently by hand.

Finally it's time to see where the bread is made. Walking past a huge horizontal oven that can old up to 192 loaves at once and a proofing rack, where the bread is left to rise naturally, Sean Oswald of Merrimack is turning a huge batch of dough onto a wooden table.

Within about a minute he's lobbing mounds of dough in the direction of Kyria Insalaco of Connecticut, working on an externship, Julie Hartman of Nashua, and Lindsay Gagnon of Hudson, all ambidextrous loaf kneaders.

"Once you figure out the motions, it's actually easier to knead two at the same time," says Hartman, finding her groove.

St. Hilaire gives a brief tour of the closet-sized room where the wheatberries are ground into flour, moving on to an aromatic batch of dough rising in a giant bowl.

"We're working with Peak Organic out of Main, which makes 100 percent organic beer, for our beer bread. It's a new recipe I developed – Nutbrown Ale and cranberry –  and it's really good," St. Hilaire says. "We replace the water with beer, and it takes a case to make 24 loaves, so that's a bottle per loaf," St. Hilaire says.

He expects the hearty, fragrant loaf will catch on, and might be a popular, obvious choice for weekend warriors hosting Super Bowl parties.

By the time he's done explaining the process behind beer bread, a new batch is ready for the oven. The lunch crowd is about to descend for a full menu of soup and sandwiches, and St. Hilaire needs to restock the bread sample board, which sits proudly atop the old cast iron stove, for the undecided or epicurious.

"All we need to do now is get the word out. We like to deliver what we call "winning hearts" baskets to local businesses. We just show up with a basket full of bread and say, 'Hello. Heere's our bread. We hope you like it, and come check out our bakery.' We're not selling widgets here," St. Hilaire said.

"Bringing someone a loaf of bread is something everyone relates to at a core level. Taking a bread basket, for us, as as much an introduction to our business as it is a thank you to our neighboring businesses," St. Hilaire said. "That community connection means something; it's about bringing back that old sense of community."

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