Flour Bakery + Café, Boston, MA
This summer I had the opportunity to intern at the Boston-based Flour Bakery + Café, owned and operated by James Beard Award winner Joanne Chang. In my position as a business intern, I experienced every aspect of running a successful bakery company, from shadowing managers and working on the line, to spending days working alongside Flour’s director of operations, Mike Brucklier. Flour Bakery + Café is a quick-service café with nine locations in Boston and Cambridge. I worked at Flour for the year leading up to the pandemic as a counter staff team member while in high school and was eager to return this summer.
Over the course of my eight weeks at Flour, I shadowed more than 20 people and worked across five departments: accounting, marketing, culinary, catering and management/operations. I learned software, including QuickBooks, Bill.com, FlexiBake, CrunchTime, Spoonfed and Toast, and I improved my Excel skills. Highlights of my internship at Flour included corporate-efficiency training on Day 1, slicing pizza for Flour’s largest pizza order (144 slices!) on Day 3, staging food for an internal photoshoot, creating numerous spreadsheets to make marketing and accounting tasks take 20 minutes or less (instead of half a day), helping run a kids’ cookie-baking class led by Joanne, and truly something memorable every single day in between. I am someone who loves to learn through change—and that certainly was my experience. Every day I did something new, often changing locations and responsibilities halfway through the day.
Interning at Flour was an especially exciting experience for me, as Flour is pursuing pathways to growth. They are rebuilding post-pandemic and are focusing on finding ways to run more efficiently as a company, bolstering their e-commerce department and forming new partnerships.
I was particularly impressed by the way that Flour runs in regards to people. Following the lead of Joanne, management treats every employee and customer respectfully and seriously considers every question and request put forward. Flour’s values were also evident in the way all employees treated me: I was invited to every single meeting (the finance and e-commerce ones were my favorite) and was encouraged to ask questions and share my opinion as much as possible.
My time at Flour was an invaluable experience that has only made me more excited for the future and inspired me to ask myself more questions about what I want to do with my career. I want to thank Joanne, Mike and the entire Flour team for welcoming me with open arms and making my eight weeks so educational, meaningful, unique and memorable. I also would like to thank Dawn Dellea and the staff at the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for providing Williams students with access to special opportunities like mine. Finally, I am so grateful for Mr. and Mrs. Case, who allowed me to explore my interest in baking and business through this internship. Their generosity is extremely appreciated, and this was a summer I truly will never forget.