Today we’d like to introduce you to Kris & Ryan Wilson.
Kris & Ryan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
In January 2020, we embarked on what was to be an 18-month around-world adventure that we had saved for years to do. We left our corporate jobs in San Francisco behind, said goodbye to our home in Oakland, and moved our cats and belongings to Las Vegas where Kris’ parents live. We felt we were destined for more than what our lives at the time were providing us, and we hoped to find inspiration along our travels that would point us in a new direction.
After 2 months of traveling in Mexico & Nicaragua, we landed in Uruguay the day before all of the borders around the world closed, March 17, 2020. What seemed at first to be a minor hiccup turned into what we all now have lived through. Uruguay was handling the pandemic extremely well and had completely closed its borders so the cases there were extremely low. We decided to “stick things out” there. We ended up living in Uruguay for 5 months. While there, Kris spent some time learning to make cheese from an incredible local natural cheesemaker, while Ryan began learning about sourdough bread baking (like everyone else). At each Airbnb we would move to, Ryan would need to learn a new oven, and attempt to make bread with no scale and flours that were unfamiliar. While those first loaves weren’t pretty, they sparked an interest in this thing that is the perfect combination of science and art. He read as many books as he could and did as much research on the internet as possible.
When we returned to the United States in October 2020, Ryan continued to bake while we stayed at Kris’ parent’s house in Las Vegas, working on what our next step would be. This time he had digital scales, a dutch oven to bake in, and access to the flour he wanted to use. He created a new starter (sadly we had to leave our original one in South America), and as he kept baking we eventually had to give loaves away to family and friends since there was too much for just us. That turned into Kris posting a notice for free bread to anyone in our neighborhood on Next Door, and our first day of baking 20 loaves was upon us. Fast forward 2 years and we now both work full-time operating our sourdough bakery out of our home in downtown Las Vegas. Ryan makes all of the sourdough bread (we have 9 options currently), and Kris makes the sourdough focaccia, sourdough sticky buns, “the cookie” (which is a brown butter, dark chocolate & sea salt cookie that has sourdough in it too), and she operates the farmer’s markets and marketing.
The idea of working in food was always a dream for Kris, and who would have guessed that Ryan would go from never baking anything in his life to having a natural talent for baking sourdough bread? To be part of a community as strong as the local food community is here in Las Vegas, interacting with our customers (the bread fam) 5 days a week at markets, and know we are providing high quality, delicious products weekly to those people is exactly what we set out to find when we took the leap and left our previous life behind, we just never figured we would find it in the middle of a pandemic.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
We would say there were 2 hardest parts. The first was moving forward with absolutely no idea if this would be able to financially support us. When we decided to give this a real go, we took another leap and took 6 months of living expenses out of savings to support us while we started to build our brand. We moved into our own house and gave ourselves that time to just work as hard as we could and see what we could do. We were fortunate to be in a place where we still had savings from our around-the-world trip being cut short to lean on.
This leads to the second hardest part…learning to work with your partner 24 hours a day! It is definitely difficult to keep perspective and be proud of what you are accomplishing when you are in the weeds of doing it. Originally we were both baking as well as doing all of the markets together, and as we grew we realized it was so much better to divide the tasks and to also have breaks from each other and be able to come back together at the end of the day with things to contribute from that time apart. That was when the business really started to take more shape. Now Ryan does the lion’s share of the baking & financial side of the business, while Kris is at all of the markets and does deliveries & marketing.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We are a sourdough bakery that operates out of our home in Las Vegas, NV. We sell our bread at 5 farmers’ markets across the valley and also have 6 pickup locations around town. We focus on sourcing the highest quality flour, specifically stone-milled flour which has much higher nutrition and flavor than commodity flour. We source from farms & mills with beliefs that align with ours, with a focus on regenerative farming. We also have a German stone mill in our home and we mill some of our flour from wheat berries right before we mix our dough. Our focus on flour and supporting small farmers that are putting in the work to grow heritage grains is something we are very proud of.
We also knew early on that supporting our community was a top priority, so in our first month of selling bread from our doorstep, we decided to create Carbs for a Cause, which is what we call our monthly donations. We asked our customers for local organizations that mean something to them, and we choose one each month to donate 15% of one market’s sales to. It has been an incredible way to get to know what matters to our customers and to learn about the incredible people doing non-profit work here. We are so proud that in our first 2 years as a new small business we were able to put over $6,000 back into the community.
Networking and finding a mentor can have a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Our advice is to be in a field that you are authentically connected to. Since Kris has always had a huge passion for all things food & beverage, all of the networking and connections we have made have come from her being out in the community in a real way.
All of our pick-up locations around town are places that we were patrons at and supported, and it was a natural progression for them to be open to collaborating with us. From our favorite local butcher shop to our favorite wine bar, coffee shop, brewery, cheese shop, and even clothing store, when you connect with people that align with your core values opportunities present themselves.
Contact Info:
- Website: 5098bread.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/5098bread/
- Facebook: facebook.com/5098bread
