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Sauce and Bread Kitchen's Granola Bars Selling Big

By Benjamin Woodard | September 25, 2014 5:22am
 Sauce and Bread Kitchen's SBK Bar sales are going "gangbusters," owner Mike Bancroft said.
Sauce and Bread Kitchen's SBK Bar sales are going "gangbusters," owner Mike Bancroft said.
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EDGEWATER — Sauce and Bread Kitchen's store-made granola bars have been selling so fast it's been tough to keep up with production, owner Mike Bancroft said.

"Out of any of the Sauce and Bread products, it’s by far the" best selling, he said. "The granola bars are gangbusters."

In the first nine months of the year, 15,000 of the small, hand-packaged bars have been sold individually to cafe diners and wholesale to coffee shops throughout the city.

Bancroft and business partner Anne Kostroski are now turning to their customers to help them buy new packaging equipment that will help them keep up and even boost production.

The cafe, at 6338 N. Clark St., has raised more than $6,000 of its $25,000 goal on Kickstarter. With the money, Bancroft said, they'll replace their crude hang-packaging system with machines that'll do most of the work for them.

"It’s sort of this hilarious Rube Goldberg-esque process," he said of their current setup, which sometimes requires as many as five or six people.

The new equipment would slice the bars and then seal them in plastic. "What took 15 minutes will take 12 seconds," he said.

Bancroft said they looked into outsourcing the baking and packaging process, but most factories required them to order more bars than they needed or wouldn't allow them to source their own ingredients, which now include Three Sisters Garden oats and Wisconsin's Gentle Breeze Honey.

The bars retail for $3.50, but the machines would allow them to lower prices, too.

Those interested in helping Sauce and Bread Kitchen can donate online until Oct. 13.

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