Baker mixes right business recipe

The crowd was thick as honey around Earlene Moore’s booth during the recent inaugural Downtown Farmers Market in Arlington.

The owner-baker has a 12-year record of success with her baked goods business aptly named Breads & Moore. But on this day, the entrepreneur was surprised to find her products quickly sold out.

“There were so many people, they couldn’t get to my table,” Moore said. “Some people even bought several baked goods. People just get excited about something homemade.”

It’s those bankable made-from-scratch baked goods – sweet breads, cakes, cobblers, pies and yeast breads – that are the key ingredients to Moore’s rising success.

Moore said her Arlington-based woman-owned company, which also is a certified Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, is a result of a talent she didn’t even know she had.

Growing up in a small, two-stoplight town in North Carolina, Moore watched her mother as she baked for her family, which includes two sisters. She delighted in following in her mom’s flour-dusted footprints.

“My mother had always baked so I watched and helped her,” Moore said. “She would make a cake on Thursday and have to hide it until Sunday. Our house always smelled so good, and we enjoyed being together eating her delicious cakes and cobblers.”

By the time Moore was 13, she was experimenting with and altering her mother’s recipes and those she found in cookbooks, turning out her own creative versions of Italian cream cakes, cheese cakes, carrot and pound cakes.

When Moore left home for college, she thought she’d never bake again. She graduated from North Carolina A&T State University with a degree in fashion merchandising and began a career in retail management. In 1981, Moore, now 53, became a buyer for the Army & Air Force Exchange Service headquartered in Dallas. Married since 1988 to husband, Kenneth, Moore quit her job at the exchange service after almost 12 years to be a stay-at-home mom for their oldest son. That’s when she found time to take up her passion for baking again.

“I had to teach myself how to bake again,” she said. “I was in Texas, married to a Texan, and a long way from home. So I got videos and cookbooks from the library and taught myself how to bake.”

Moore began bartering her gourmet bread and honey butter for babysitting. Friends started asking her how they could get their names on the “bread list” for her baked goods. “There was no list,” she said, with a laugh. “I was just giving away my baked goods and then friends kept encouraging me to sell them. But I didn’t have any idea how to start a business.”

A friend at a local hair salon, the Hair Doctors, let Moore bring some of her tasty treats to the shop for customers to sample.

“They fought over the bread down to the last piece,” Moore said. “That’s when I got my business started. They sponsored me. They bought business cards for me and the ingredients for my baked goods and let me sell my products in the salon. That was 10 years ago. I’m forever grateful to them for giving me my start.”

Moore is among the 40 percent of women-owned private businesses nationwide. According to a study titled The Economic Impact of Women-Owned Businesses in the United States recently published by the Center for Women’s Business Research, minority women were the majority owners of 1.9 million companies, with 1.2 million employees and $165 billion in annual revenue. Minority women-owned businesses were the fastest-growing group among all companies from 2002 to 2008, the center said.

Nationally, minority women started companies at three times the rate of other women in the past 20 years, but the average revenue of those businesses is less than 25 percent that of businesses owned by white women, the report goes on to say. Minority women business owners face greater challenges to business growth than white women in areas such as human resources, access to capital, cash flow and marketing.

Moore knows well many of the obstacles women business owners have to overcome in order to succeed and grow. Everywhere she goes, she hands out teaser cards and samples of her goodies, which are preservative free and includes a line of healthy, sugar-free and reduced fat products. 

“In the food business, you have to do that so people will know what you have,” she said. “I want to be the best. I want to be the ‘wow’ when people taste my baked goods. I don’t want to be just OK but the very best.”

But the baker relies on more than word-of-mouth advertising for her home-based business. She’s received assistance from new contacts made at Elixir Kitchen Space, a kitchen incubator in Fort Worth, where she rents commercial space. Networking, as well as attending classes and seminars offered through the Fort Worth Business Assistance Center and area chambers of commerce, has helped grow her small enterprise, she said. Four years ago, Moore was a finalist for the Mayor’s Entrepreneur Award in Fort Worth.

“The Internet has made a big difference in helping me create my recipes and in marketing the business,” she said.

She’s currently adding a shopping cart to her Web site, www.breadsandmoore.com, to increase shipping capabilities, and is learning how to navigate social networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

“I love what I do. It’s a passion. And it’s a ministry,” she said. “I love to bake and give things away. It’s so much fun to see people happy. But it’s also a business and not a hobby. If you do what you love and have a passion for it the money will come. That’s where I am now.”