Ceres Bakery Celebrates 20 Years of Community in Downtown Kalispell
After weathering the Great Recession and the pandemic, owners Hannah Bjornson and Rick Grimm have maintained a community-centered atmosphere at the bakery on South Main Street where the sourdough bread and pastries are a staple of downtown
By Maggie Dresser
During the busiest months of the summer when sourdough bread and Danish pastries are flying off the shelves, there are times when the doors remain unlocked for days at Ceres Bakery in downtown Kalispell as staff shuffle in and out during all hours. But even in the slower months, the Main Street staple is occupied with employees for 22 hours out of the day, closing only between 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. when the bakers rise.
“Sometimes the door doesn’t even lock,” said Hannah Bjornson, co-founder and co-owner of Ceres Bakery. “People are just coming and going all the time.”
Bjornson and her husband, Rick Grimm, opened Ceres’ doors to the public two decades ago on South Main Street with a business model primarily centered around a local wholesale bread distribution, which accounts for a third of sales today.
Grimm worked for years at Le Petit Outre in Missoula, learning the trade of French-style bread baking under Leif Bjelland before leaving to work for Montana Rail Link. But after a few years of work in the railroad business, which failed to fulfill Grimm’s creative impulses, he returned to his craft and moved to Kalispell to open a bakery with Bjornson.
Before a bakery location was secured, the couple purchased a used, 5-ton French oven, which had to be disassembled and transported in a moving van to eventually sit in a storage unit by Glacier Park International Airport until they found a home for it. But with no reassembly manual for the massive commercial oven that’s not even sold in the United States, Grimm on a whim pleaded for help on a Bread Bakers Guild of America online forum.
A French Columbian oven tech named Alvaro Duque-Zamora answered their prayers and in exchange for hotel and food reimbursement and northwest Montana sightseeing, he traveled from New York City to help assemble the oven, which took 80 hours over a time frame of two weeks.
“He’s our fairy godmother,” Bjornson said. “We would be dead in the water without him.”
Named after the Roman goddess of grain, Ceres Bakery was born in 2006.
Just a few years after opening, Bjornson and Grimm weathered the Great Recession that rippled through the economy as the commodity prices of flour and milk skyrocketed while they did their best to maintain affordable prices.
A decade later, the pandemic posed its own set of unique challenges. And while they adapted to the times with things like masks, curbside service and isolating staff as much as possible, Ceres was deemed an essential service under state guidelines and remained open. As they waited for a return to normal business operations, renovations and an expansion next door began to provide seating — a comfort the bakery didn’t have until the former tenant moved out.
“The business has changed a lot,” Grimm said. “During Covid, I feel like we unplugged the computer, crossed our fingers and it booted itself up a little differently.”
But despite the changes, their roles have maintained consistently with Grimm handling the bread-baking and delivery side of the business while the self-taught Bjornson immersed herself in pastries, which began with staples like the berry and cheese Danish and the classic croissant. Eventually, she began experimenting with new flavor combinations like lavender and blackberry, or prosciutto, brie and pear, and she continues to add variety to the shelves.
Ceres’ General Manager Haley Lindgren, too, contributes to the bakery’s unique pastries. She’s one of 25 staff that the owners say make the business tick. Small acts like remembering regulars’ orders and checking in if a consistent customer doesn’t walk through the doors for a few days.
“People love the baked goods, but I think a lot of it is just the community,” Bjornson said.
