The owners of Duchess Bake Shop have purchased the building that's been their long-time headquarters on 124 Street, as well as an adjacent property, to allow for an ambitious renovation and consolidation project that's soon to be complete.
"When I conceived of Duchess, it was always going to be a long-term, permanent fixture of the city," co-founder and co-owner Garner Beggs told Taproot. "This is the culmination of a very long-term plan … It (was never intended to be) a startup that you start up and spin off and then run away."
In 2023, Beggs and his business partners, Ewa Jastrzebski and Jay Downton, purchased the main storefront that Duchess has rented since 2009. Then, about a year later, they purchased the building next door (Beggs said he was unable to provide sales figures for the deals). The adjoined properties have roughly doubled Duchess's interior space.
Beggs and his team are now midway through renovating that space to consolidate its bakery and café, its retail offerings for home bakers, and its production and teaching kitchen all under a shared roof. The company's retail and kitchen operations have been previously housed at a building a few blocks away.
Since the acquisitions, the Duchess team has remodelled the main dining area, and will next open a new section for retail products in mid-December. The south addition has a basement that Beggs said will eventually become an event space. The dual-purpose kitchen, meanwhile, will open in January.
Each phase of the renovation represents one part of Duchess's "three-legged" model, which Beggs said aims to inspire Edmontonians to expect better.
"I think the stronger a food culture you have, the stronger and better your culture is — period. That was the thing I wanted to focus on with the company," Beggs said. "A huge element of that is just (sharing) the knowledge of it … I think people then expect more. If you go to some giant chain store, and you're paying $10 for a rock-hard, garbage scone, people know that that's not how it's supposed to be. That was kind of the 'grand why' (behind Duchess)."
The first phase of renovations is now complete at Duchess Bake Shop. Two more phases are planned for completion in mid-December and at some point in January, respectively. (Supplied)
Beggs also said the consolidation is not only practical, but also gives the Duchess team a sense of unity.
"(Having two sites was) detrimental to the company culture," Beggs said. "Having that split, with the cooks working all day in the production kitchen, they didn't get to see the public's reaction on the daily. Likewise, the people working in the café didn't get to see how hard the cooks were working … When the opportunity came up to buy the neighbouring building, it was kind of a dream come true."
In addition to benefiting culture, the consolidation will lead to both money and time being saved, Beggs said. "There definitely is some economy of scale that you get. Even though (the two properties were) just a few minutes apart from each other, having to run back and forth constantly just eats up tremendous amounts of time."
With everything moving under one roof (aside from the Little Duchess sales counter at Ritchie Market, which Beggs said is thriving), Beggs said Duchess will eventually add new retail products and expand its class offerings, in addition to opening the aforementioned event space. But the new chapter for Duchess is more about cohesion than addition, he said.
"The opportunity to bring everything back under the same roof was just phenomenal," Beggs said. "I think once everything is finished, and we have the bakery and the retail shop and the teaching kitchen all under the same roof, it will create this, I guess you would call it, 'synergistic' effect. It's just a one-stop opportunity for anything pastry-related."