Wow! We’ve been overwhelmed by the support we’ve received since the Little Flour concept took root earlier this spring, and by how many of you have asked to buy our bread and support our work with hungry kids in St. Louis.  All that support has led to a couple logistical questions that we need to answer.  For those of you asking to buy our bread online, or asking if you can buy it in any local stores, the answer is regrettably no.  At least not in this chapter of life.  Little Flour is a “cottage food production operation” in Missouri which means we only bake cookies, cakes, bread (especially bread!), pastries, pies, and other “non potentially hazardous” (who’d want those anyway?!?) food items that we sell ourselves.  We bake them right here in our own home kitchen, which is thoroughly inspected for cleanliness by our lead baker’s mother and mother-in-law before placing their breakfast toast orders each month, but is not inspected by the actual health department. As a result, according to Missouri law, we can’t ship to you or open our own storefront no matter how much we appreciate your requests! And that’s actually ok with us. Tempting and flattering as the offers to sell more bread have been, our primary goal was never to sell more bread.  We’re all about feeding kids around here.  And our capacity is limited.  The bread we sell locally is very small batch and sold entirely like an old school bake sale.  Our supporters pick up their bread face-to-face on Friday afternoons, maybe share a beverage and a bit of conversation in the process, and write their checks directly to the local non-profits we support.  We do an occassional pop-up bake sale around town to raise money for these organizations working to end hunger, especially hunger among youth and kids, and you can follow us on Instagram (@littleflourmicrobakery) if you’d like to know where to find us. Funds raised are earmarked by the agencies to buy ingredients for our baking classes and to make healthy baked goods on site for kids that are hungry in our city.  If we spent too much time and oven capacity making bread to sell, we’d have no capacity left to feed the kids we set out to serve.  The good news is that anyone who loves to bake can do the same thing in their own neighborhood, and we certainly hope that you’ll give it a try. We’ll keep sharing our stories and recipes and would love to hear from you about the people you’re baking for in your community too!