We do a lot of pies here, which doesn’t surprise me! I grew up making pies, and every holiday is pie time. Here, you’ve got to have your pimento cheese. We are going to add a pimento cheese sandwich to our lineup. There are some tastes and flavors that some folks like in different places. I’ll do a few, and the cheese breads are round, but people are like, I don’t know what to do with round bread. We still do round ones, but they are not our best sellers. Here, Southern folks prefer rectangles and sandwich loaves. A lot of the bakeries in other parts of the country still lean heavily on those round loaves. A lot of the Great Harvest originally had round loaves. There are regional differences the market will gravitate toward what they like and there are trends that we see. Like this year, we all used the King Cake recipe that the Louisiana store owner had. If someone finds something really great, they share it with the other owners. We have tried and true tested recipes that we all use. The other owners really collaborate and share. They source the wheat, we mill it, and bake fresh daily. We only have one hard and fast rule: that we mill our wheat that they source from Montana here in bakery. Great Harvest is what we call a “freedom franchise.” We have almost like our own little social network with all the owners, and we get a lot of good training from corporate, and we all share good ideas and best practices. We had that connection and it all seemed like it was meant to be. One of the guys who rode with us occasionally happened to be the CEO of Great Harvest – we didn’t know that was what he did, we just knew he was attached to the company in some way. My husband and I did triathlon training groups and we rode with big groups of people. We were exploring opportunities with the company. There are several Great Harvest Bread Companies in Charlotte, and we had always been fans of the company. I moved to Charlotte ten or twelve years ago, but I was born and raised in Tennessee. We found this opportunity and our five year plan got bumped right up! It was calling our name. We had been thinking about opening our own Great Harvest in this area because we just loved it here. The former owner did this for 25 years and was ready to pass the baton, so my husband and I saw that it was for sale and we moved here from Charlotte and bought the bakery. I have been at this Great Harvest Bread Co since September, but the business has been here for 35 years: at this location for ten years, and 15 years before that on Market Street. And I had a longing to get back in the bakery, back in the kitchen, back on my feet. I spent a lot of time sitting in a cubicle. I spent some time working in the corporate world. Then, in my twenties, in Charlotte, I worked in a bakery and a catering company for awhile. She said, “If you want it, here you go…” and I just kind of muddled my way through it. I remember one day telling my mom I wanted pie for dessert, and she pulled out the recipe card and said, “Make it!” “

“I loved baking since I was tall enough to reach the counter. 20 Shares Jodie Hawthorne, Owner, Great Harvest Bread Co:

Great harvest bread company recipe