“My Dad was obsessed with farms; for a few years when I was growing up, we had a huge garden,” said Lucy Damkoehler, chef and owner of Sweet Lucy’s Bakeshop. “My dad was probably one of the first-ever residents of Franklin County to drive around with a Local Hero bumper sticker on his car.”
Damkoehler’s parents moved from Chicago to Bernardston, the current location of the bakery and where Damkoehler grew up. The chef graduated from the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont “right at the beginning of the farm-to-fork movement,” said Damkoehler. “Throughout my entire career, it’s clear that we need farms to run food businesses. Farmers are the most important business partners that we [chefs] can have.”
Damkoehler and her husband were in Seattle when they got the call that a bakery was becoming available in her hometown. From the start, Sweet Lucy’s Bakeshop sourced ingredients from local farms.
“When I moved here, every day farmers were coming here to deliver,” Damkoehler said. “My chef friends in Seattle are so jealous of our way of life here.”
Damkoehler’s father brought her to Clarkdale Orchards for apples as a child. “We would have ‘who could make that the shiniest apple’ competitions on the drive with my siblings,” she said.
As a returning chef, Damkoehler had an instant connection with Ben Clark. “I walked into his shop, we started chatting and realized that we had some fun connections,” she said.
Sweet Lucy’s Bakeshop still sources the majority of its fruit from Clarkdale Orchards. “I feel like I’m also a farmer groupie, like my dad. I could never do the work of a farmer. That’s why I’m doing this,” said Damkoehler. In addition to Clarkdale, “I get a giant amount of berries from Couch Brook Farm. They have been friends of ours forever.”
While in Seattle, the chef fell in love with dahlias. Unlike in New England, Seattle residents do not dig their dahlias up in the fall and replant them in the spring. Wild Bramble Farm sells flowers at Sweet Lucy’s and coaches Damkoehler on growing her own dahlias, highlighting how relationships are the basis of the bake shop, whether on the bench or in the flower beds. Damkoehler credits growing dahlias as an expression of her work-life balance.
The theme of balance is ever-present for Damkoehler, as she manages her roles as a business owner and a mother. “I’m a mom, so I had two kids and worked straight through both pregnancies,” she said. “For my second pregnancy, I made three batches of scones in an 80-quart mixer and then went to the hospital and delivered my daughter that evening. It’s part of my DNA to make sure that nothing holds me back, including pregnancy.”
“We’ve had three bakery babies among our staff in the last year and a half. I had empathy for my staff, and it was an interesting experience as a business owner,” she continued. “It was challenging to understand my position as a boss, as a mom, as a human. I don’t know if a man would have thought like that, balancing between being a boss and being empathetic to the situation of a new parent.”
While pregnancy is an understandable challenge for a female chef, Damkoehler’s biggest business challenge is current supply chain issues. Because major distributors deem the Bernardston location too remote, Damkoehler has only one choice of supplier for her baking supplies, including paper products, King Arthur Flour, chocolate, cinnamon and vanilla.
Damkoehler’s commitment to her customers — who are both local and travelers on I-91 — rests upon a foundation of consistent, high-quality breakfast pastries, cakes, tarts and pies. In the current business environment, large food distributors cannot get common ingredients, like high-quality chocolate chunks or coffee cups.
“I think the hardest part about the business is my obsession with consistency. How can I have consistency when I have a product that’s not the same? The one thing I lose the most sleep over is our chocolate chunk cookies,” she said. “When I don’t have chocolate chunks, then I have to do chocolate chips, which I refuse because it’s not a chocolate chunk.”
In keeping with her commitment to local sourcing, Sweet Lucy’s brews No. Six Depot Coffee from West Stockbridge. Because of supply issues, however, Damkoehler can no longer get the same cups and lids the bakery has always used. Similarly, the bakery boxes the chef can get are made of cheaper materials, detracting from the spectacular contents inside.
“I have high expectations and I pay my bakers a ton of money to make the best food ever,” Damkoehler said. “Then we go and put it in a box, and nobody’s held accountable. Small businesses are the ones left to pay the most expensive price for supplies and have the least amount of control over what they receive.”
Nonetheless, Damkoehler forges ahead with a stellar crew, elevating classic pastries in the bakeshop in Bernardston. She will offer more cooking classes for adults this fall, and a line of baking mixes is in the works. She hopes to offer the mixes in support of local fundraisers for schools and nonprofits.
Enjoy a taste of Sweet Lucy’s Bakeshop at 7 South St. in Bernardston. They are open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and closed on Sundays and Mondays. Learn more at sweetlucysbakeshop.com and on Facebook and Instagram.
Lisa Goodrich is a communications coordinator with Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA). To find restaurants and bakeries sourced from local farms, see CISA’s online guide at buylocalfood.org/find-it-locally. Local Hero bumper stickers are available from CISA’s website.