Kneading connections

With a focus on quality and brand, Artisan Bakery rises in the west

Photo: Artisan Bakery owner Sean Hannam

THERE’S A FAMOUS thought experiment about the Ship of Theseus in ancient Athens, which imagines a ship that has had each of its planks replaced over time. Is it, in the end, the same ship at all?

Click here to view this story in magazine format

We might ask the same question about a contemporary bakery: If many of the major components — the ingredients, the recipes, the trained hands of the bakers — all change but the name and the location remain, is this a new bakery or an old bakery reimagined?

Story Continues Below

 

Sean Hannam could weigh in on this. He purchased Artisan Bakery on Dundas Street in Old East Village in 2021. A classically trained chef who learned the art of French pastry while working in the French Caribbean, Hannam was working at the Downie Street Bakehouse in Stratford during the pandemic. He was looking to open his own bakery in London when the old Artisan Bakery announced it was closing.

“They were just going to parcel everything out, and it was just going to be gone,” Hannam recalls, “so it was kind of a good opportunity to just take all the equipment and start that way.”

One of the first decisions Hannam made was to keep the name. “It had been around for long enough that it made sense to keep it in the community and try to revive it.”

What he didn’t want to do, however, was what the bakery was doing before — a diplomatic way of saying he wanted to drastically improve the quality. “Now, we make everything ourselves,” he says. Most of the produce comes from Common Ground Farm; milk is sourced from Proof Line Farm; flour from the Arva Flour Mill. “It’s just using good ingredients in general and then making traditional products properly.”

Whether you see this as a new ­bakery, or an old one with a new owner, Hannam says step-one upon opening in October 2021 was to rebuild community trust and support that had been somewhat lost in the years before he took over.

“A lot of people had kind of stopped going there, frankly,” Hannam says. “It took a lot of legwork to show we were doing something different; something good and wholesome.”

Part of the legwork was to extend its retail footprint with a vendor stall at The Market at Western Fair District on Saturdays and Sundays. The next step in the bakery’s evolution came in May 2022, when they signed up as a vendor at the Komoka Community Market, which was emerging as one of the top farmers markets in the region. “That was a huge growth point for us. It allowed us to more than double our production and get in front of a lot of new people, and that brought a lot of people to the Dundas location,” Hannam says.

Now, Hannam has parlayed that demand into a permanent presence in the west end, with a new space opened within indoor kids centre The Campus Play Studio in Kilworth. “The [Campus Play] owner was a regular of ours at the Komoka market, and she reached out to me — she wanted to offer a space where parents could sit and drink coffee and their kids could go and play.”

Story Continues Below

 

Opened in February, Hannam says it isn’t a complicated operation — it offers a similar product lineup to the Old East store and is supplied out of the Dundas Street kitchen — but it delivers a full-time way to supply the west-end community, largely composed of affluent young families, in their own backyard. “It wasn’t necessarily a move where we needed to be in the west end and that’s where the money’s at, but it was more of an opportunity — and obviously saying yes made sense because of where it is.”

Retail sales remain the focus for Artisan, Hannam says, rather than ­pursuing larger wholesale deals. They work a bit with other local restaurants, like Anderson Craft Ales and Supply & Demand Beer and Pizza, but those are bespoke deals. “If we had the space and equipment to make thousands of buns, we could sell thousands of buns, because everyone’s always asking,” Hannam says. Instead, they’re focused on getting more products into the hands of more people and entrenching Artisan into the community — making it the place where people go every morning to get their coffee and a loaf of bread. Kieran Delamont